Flashback: 2015. Valentine’s Day. There you were, sobbing on the curb outside the neighborhood watering hole, rain falling slowly, chocolates melting in their heart-shaped box, bouquet of blood-red flowers already cartoonishly wilting. You’d been waiting, waiting for Ruth… and Nat and Adam and Johnny. Oh, Johnny!
But you’d been stood up. We all were, us connoisseurs of impeccably mixed, nocturnal synth-pop, stood up by the enigmatic whims of the very auteur producer whose compositions got us so worked up in the first place.
Well, it is happening again.
This morning, Chromatics have unveiled the video for “Black Walls,” the first single from their long-anticipated fifth album Dear Tommy, whose original version was infamously destroyed (15,000 CDs and 10,000 LPs) by Johnny Jewel himself. The Kill for Love follow-up has been teased for so long it now feels more like its own follow-up. How will it finally measure up against the stray tracks we heard in 2014-2015 or, more importantly, against the phantom albums we’ve been playing in our heads for three years? Well, we’ll soon find out. The video for “Black Walls” — for sale as a single this Friday, May 18 — comes with another announcement: “Dear Tommy out Fall 2018 on Italians Do It Better.”
It’s not quite a release date, and maybe it’s no more concrete than “out in time for Valentine’s Day,” but it’s the most we’ve heard in a while from the Italians Do It Better camp re: Dear Tommy. It feels good. And this new song seems portentous: “Black walls closing in,” Ruth Radelet sings.
Watch the video for “Black Walls” here: