My 2010s music blogger spider sense is tingling. Fear Of Men, one of the most underrated bands of that decade, have not dropped an album since 2016's Fall Forever, and they haven't released any new music at all since 2020's "Into Strangeness." Who knows if and when we'll hear from the Brighton band again, but for now, frontperson Jessica Weiss is going it alone.
Today Weiss has announced her debut solo album under the name New German Cinema. Pain Will Polish Me is coming two months from now. Weiss calls it a meditation on pop and European art-house auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She produced it with Alex DeGroot between London and LA.
Pain Will Polish Me is preceded today by lead single "My Mistake." It's a duet with Carson Cox of Merchandise, another band that has me nostalgically flashing back to the indie rock hype cycles of the late Obama era. (They returned a few months ago with their first song in nine years, so hopefully they have more in store.) "I was going to produce Fear Of Men and instead we made something totally different I think," Cox says in a press release. "True collaboration which is my preferred way to work on music."
"My Mistake" is accompanied by a video directed by Luke Bather. Weiss shared these thoughts on the clip:
The video sets the emotional tone for the record, suspended between eroticism and nightmare. It draws on cropped mirror framing - a favourite device of Douglas Sirk used to explore themes of emotional and physical entrapment and characters' inner psychological conflicts - moments of dissociation, and the television as a symbol of alienation, inspired by my perennial inspiration, RW Fassbinder.
Bather offered his own statement:
Our initial starting point was, predictably, the New German Cinema movement. However, when we discussed the themes of the song in more depth, the video evolved into its own beast. Sex, death, repressed desire, and good old-fashioned Catholic Guilt all loom large in the video through a series of performance vignettes inspired by everything from the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder through to the paintings of Francis Bacon and everything in between. Adding to this, we have the spectre of Carson haunting the video as a ghostly analogue broadcast interspersed with archival footage of Berlin in the 1970s; an inescapable reminder of the past and a nod to the original New German Cinema movement.
Watch below.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Sub Rosa"
02 "Swirling Pain"
03 "Being Dead"
04 "I Become Heavy"
05 "Hera's Theme I"
06 "Eyes"
07 "Water Drops"
08 "Hera's Theme II"
09 "My Mistake"
10 "All That Heaven Allows"
11 "Pain Will Polish Me"
12 "Perfect Secret"
Pain Will Polish Me is out 3/27 on Felte. Pre-order it here.
