Or Best Offer announces their debut album, ‘Center’, out January 26th, and releases “Jacket,” the first single.
On ‘Center’, Grace Schmidhauser and Brian Culligan invite us into a world of unstable nostalgia; footsteps, carnival noises, and sludgy guitars coalesce with moments of sublimity.
The experimental rock duo made up of primary songwriter, vocalist and guitarist Schmidhauser, and drummer and synthesist Culligan. They work with a sense of ceaseless wonder and invention, moving between instruments and technique with fluidity and intuition. After years of collaboration in various forms since their initial meeting in 2018, Or Best Offer’s debut album Center arrives as both a document of and extrapolation on their live sound. The album was created and mixed during a period of geographical transition for Schmidhauser, and fittingly, the world of Center has a unique physics and an unstable gravity, as prone to sudden weightlessness as it is brute force. Recorded and produced by the two entirely in Culligan’s Ridgewood bedroom, Center takes a sensitive, loving approach to its materials with both molecular precision and widescreen grandeur. Distorted ribbons of Wurlitzer twirl against clattering cymbals; signals cut in and out like farewell transmissions.
Listen to “Jacket” here