Tim Kinsella & Jenny Pulse today released their ambitious and wildly adventurous debut album, Giddy Skelter, via Kill Rock Stars—stream it at all DSPs HERE and order it HERE. They’ve also shared a new music video for album standout “Over & Over,” directed by sua yoo. “A terse three-minute neo-noir thriller filled with iconic interdisciplinary cameos, featuring Tim & Jenny as a sublime torch band stalked by a poet-prowler played by writer Jesse Ball and a cameo by writer Camille Bordas as sound person,” says yoo of the video. “Plus, a reveal of the band’s esoteric stage setup.”
The first album under their unadorned birth names, Giddy Skelter features singles “Sun Inspector,” “Unblock Obstacles,” “Whinny,” and “Nena,” which earned early praise via Stereogum, Under the Radar, Ghettoblaster, Northern Transmissions, and more. Brooklyn Vegan today shared a list of the disparate Influences that inspired the Chicago duo throughout the recording process, and Talkhouse recently explored the creation of single “Whinny” and three-song digital EP. Tim & Jenny will celebrate the release with a series of fall shows, including Chicago’s Empty Bottle on September 9th and NYC’s Knitting Factory on October 12th. A full itinerary is listed below, and more live dates will be announced soon.
Kinsella and Pulse have spent years making thoughtful and unpredictable art, whether musically as Joan of Arc or Spa Moans, or under their given names as writers and visual artists. To assemble Giddy Skelter, they aggressively trimmed their tracklist until they had a lean and impactful 11 songs, unlike anything either musician has released before. By mixing live instrumentation with samples so manipulated it’s impossible to identify their origins, Kinsella and Pulse create music that feels both eerily familiar yet inarguably the product of their effort, a testament to their exacting process.
“I was an electronic producer who wanted to be in a rock band and Tim was in a rock band and wanted to become more of a producer,” recalls Pulse. “But at the end of the day we realized we can’t escape ourselves. Despite wanting to depart from the past, we settled into what we are each good at, but with different gear and approaches to try and create something surprising to ourselves.”
The title Giddy Skelter alludes to both Gimme Shelter, the infamous documentary about the Rolling Stones’ disastrous Altamont free concert, and the Manson Family’s Helter Skelter scenario. “In my mind, it’s this period at the end of the dream, the end of the 60s, the idea of this utopia,” Kinsella says. “Now, with lingering pandemic and its consequences, rising authoritarianism, looming climate catastrophe, these unsustainable levels of anxiety and chaos, the eras feel similarly apocalyptic.”
Sometimes the thing that makes great rock n’ roll is the ineffable and the intangible, something you can only describe as alchemy; other times it’s the rigors of process. On Kinsella and Pulse’s Giddy Skelter, it’s both—and it soun
