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Honey Harper

2022
Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky
2020
Starmaker

Honey Harper’s sophomore album, Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky is out now. The follow-up to their 2020 full-length debut StarmakerHoney Harper & The Infinite Sky emerged from a deliberate revamping of the band’s creative approach with Honey Harper co-founder and keyboardist Alana Pagnutti taking on a far greater role in the songwriting process alongside frontman William Fussell, adding a palpable new depth to their lyrical output.

The 12 song collection also marks their first time recording with their stacked band, The Infinite Sky, featuring their longtime bassist and contributing writer Mick Mayer, pianist John Carroll Kirby (Solange, Steve Lacy), Spoon keyboardist Alex Fischel, guitarist Jackson MacIntosh (Drugdealer, Jessica Pratt), pedal-steel player Connor Gallaher (Black Lips, Calexico), and TOPS drummer Riley Fleck. The album was mixed at Wowcat Studios in Los Angeles by Joel Ford (yes/and, Ford & Lopatin).

The band released the album’s debut single “Broken Token” along with a live performance video filmed at EastWest Studios in Los Angeles, CA.

““Broken Token” is our take on a new kind of southern rock anthem, whether you were home in 1973 or 2073, we wanted to take you all the way there,” explains Fussell. “We wrote and recorded the song in just 30 minutes taking cues from the Allman Brothers Band’s bluesy breed of Southern Rock & The Grateful Dead’s pastoral lyrics, unfolding in soulful harmonies and free-flowing rhythms.”

Informed by a vast range of influences from George Jones to the Bee Gees, Greek mythology to sci-fi futurism, Bowie to Baudrillard, Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky mines decades of musical history and places the most time-worn touchstones in unexpected new contexts. A postmodernist pastiche befitting of a band praised by Pitchfork for a “celestial twang that owes as much to Spiritualized as it does to Merle Haggard,” the album represents a seamless merging of Fussell and Pagnutti’s distinct artistic paths.

“Baudrillard talks about how the world we live in is so far removed from the original source, it’s impossible to distinguish between what’s authentic and inauthentic,” explains Fussell. “But with country music, every former generation questions the authenticity of the new guard: in the ’60s all the players from the ’50s said, ‘That’s not real country music,’ and that way of thinking has kept repeating itself to this day. With this record we wanted to question and play with the idea of authenticity, to push against the limits of country and hopefully create something that’s never been done before.”

Despite the high level of conceptualization that went into its creation, the record embodies an irresistibly loose and groove-heavy sound that hits with an immediate impact. While Starmaker was touted as “country music for people who don’t like country music,” Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky is “country music for everyone.”

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