Cassandra Jenkins is releasing her new album My Light, My Destroyer on July 12, and so far we've heard the '80s pop confection "Only One" and the beautiful, alien "Delphinium Blue."
Today, we get another taste of the album with the rollicking "Petco," which has some serious Pixies energy in its climbing guitar line. Seriously, close your eyes at the album's outro and you'd swear you were listening to Bossanova.
In a statement about the song, Jenkins said:
"Petco" is about looking for connection & coming up a little short. Writing from a pointedly angsty and existential place allowed me to be more playful with songwriting. I needed a space to explore the lizard brain, and deep down the song stems from the sincere belief that we are wired, on the most basic instinctual level, to love and to be loved.
I wanted to capture the sense of uncanny malaise inherent to a place that puts a price tag on nature — simultaneously granting us access to the natural world while distancing us from it, all with the promise of companionship.
I come back to the same ideas again and again in my songs, and Petco throws a new lens on a familiar thought: the further we distance ourselves from the natural world, the harder it is to find our way back. It's easy to wonder if we've gone too far, and despite my anxieties, I can't help but see the humanity in all of it.
The song features percussion and production from Andrew Lappin, guitar playing from Lilah Larson and Palehound's El Kempner, vocals from Katie Von Schleicher, rhythm from Zoë Brecher and Jesse French and keys by Michael Coleman.
Check out the self-directed video t below.