A new Hand Habits studio album, Fun House, arrives via Saddle Creek on October 22. The project masterminded by Meg Duffy previewed the 11-track LP by releasing lead single “Aquamarine” and an accompanying video.
Duffy recorded Fun House with producer Sasami Ashworth and engineer Kyle Thomas. The follow-up to their 2021 EP, dirt and 2019 full-length, placeholder features vocal contributions from Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) on tracks “No Difference” and “Just To Hear You.”
Meg shared the backstory of what led to their new album:
When the pandemic happened, everything stopped. I had been touring consistently for five years, both on my own and playing in other people’s bands, so I wasn’t really writing a lot in between. It had been full pedal to the metal in terms of traveling and scheduling, which meant I really didn’t have a lot of time to think about how I felt or really check in with myself. Then, when the world basically stopped, it turned out to be the longest I’ve been alone in my entire life — without being in a relationship, without being on the road, without working myself to exhaustion — and the result was really like, holy shit. I slammed on the brakes and everything psychologically that I’d been pushing down and ignoring for the past few years suddenly flew to the foreground.
I felt a massive shift in the way that I was seeing the world and seeing myself, moving through certain emotional patterns and behavioral patterns, and really taking them apart. Sasami empowered me to take up a lot of different sonic spaces and challenged me to rethink these limitations that I had about my own identity. I wouldn’t allow myself to step into certain roles because of the little box I was putting myself in based on all of these false narratives that I had come to believe about myself. I think this also coincides with my trans identity too, because so much of that journey for me has been me really fighting against what I’m not “allowed” to be.
Fader both premiered the “Aquamarine” video and spoke with Duffy regarding Fun House. “What originally started as a minimally arranged acoustic ballad, ‘Aquamarine’ evolved into the story of certain events in life, what informs my identity, the silence in the questions left unanswered that become the shape of understanding who I am,” Meg added. “It was my goal to cloak some of the perils of mortality (lyrically) in a musical landscape that didn’t require the listener for a large amount of patience, to bring grief into the metaphorical club.”
The “Aquamarine” video was captured by director V Haddad at a location with familial ties to Duffy. “We filmed this video in my aunt’s bar and club in upstate New York, linking the origin and lineage themes in the song with the visuals of changing identities and characters in a space I used to wander as a teen,” noted Meg.
See Hand Habits’ “Aquamarine” video below:
Fun House Tracklist
- More Than Love
- Aquamarine
- Just to Hear You (feat. Perfume Genius)
- No Difference
- Graves
- False Start
- Clean Air
- Concrete & Feathers
- The Answer
- Gold/Rust
- Control
