"Desires are Already Memories"













"I want to be loved. Everybody does."

Joe Talbot: "The beautiful thing about us being ignored for 10 years is that there was no one telling us what we couldn't do, we just had to learn it ourselves. And that meant that now I think Ultra Mono is vigorously IDLES. It's fluent in IDLES language because we've just been able to take baby steps every moment, make mistakes, and no one's fucking at our gigs so we can make mistakes and come back stronger."











"Rope off the tigers, their “freedom” is an affront to those who are free"









"I kept my eyes shut half the time. All the lights, one by one, here they come"

Hamilton Leithauser: "I wrote these songs about individual people. I wrote stories and I wrote music; and then I matched them up. Not one story was originally intended for the music it ended up marrying. These are people I know, and strangers I’ve come across in the last few years. All of the stories are based on some kind of truth, but I’m not afraid to get loose with the facts. Most are both fact and fiction, and some tilt pretty far in either direction. I guess people might call this "creative nonfiction" or just "embellished stories". I wrote and recorded these songs in a studio I built for myself in New York. It’s a tight New York kind of space, and I’m jammed in with all sorts of instruments and equipment."

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Follow their traces