Rubblebucket detailed a new album, Earth Worship, arriving on October 21 via Grand Jury. The Vermont-born, New York City-based group led by Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth previewed Earth Worship with the title track.
Press materials for the new LP described the record as a “groove-forward, joyously layered collection of songs which work to dissolve the imaginary lines between the natural world and its human inhabitants.” Traver shared her thoughts on the inspiration behind the album and more:
“Feeling the heaviness of being life is OK, and we humans are in a pickle. When we say we ‘would like to break up these patterns’, we’re talking about the unhealthy addictive extractive patterns enmeshed into our whole human-centric society. Patterns that lead us to mistakenly believe we’re isolated and not deserving of the love & pleasure of our dreams, lead us to cause needless harm to ourselves and our planet. Healing on a big scale is tied to healing on a mini scale and that’s what this album and song are working on, hoping to dance with, hoping to dream about. My favorite quote I’ve heard lately (from Krista Tippet in her conversation with adrienne maree brown) was ‘vitality has endings in it’. That’s up on my wall now. I want to ~be about~ allowing ourselves to grieve & be tender together, learning how to separate from what isn’t needed anymore, like a leaf off of a branch in fall, or like the linden flowers that are blooming now on the trees outside my window as I write this: fully mature, ready to spiral downwards to the earth and meet new energy, become more life. There are a million bazillion ways to worship the earth, and every day is an opportunity to find a new way. Making this album was one way we went for it.
The follow up to 2018’s Sun Machine, the past few years have seen Traver and Toth focusing on other projects which Toth noted brought freshness and clarity to the Earth Worship sessions. “By doing multiple records on our own and together, you just get better and better at understanding the process. Back in the day, Rubblebucket was so confusing for me,” Toth continued. “We’re interested in so many things musically. But to have no set bumpers is torturous. The process, to me, is what the album is about. The songs are just an artifact.”
The process for Earth Worship included two week-long sessions in May and November of 2020 producing 28 new songs. The duo each looked to influences they’d recently discovered in creating the album including disco for Toth and New York City DJs Rose Kourtz and Miss Alicia among other influences for Traver.
The duo began initial tracking for Earth Worship at their homes, layering vintage Juno 60 and Yamaha DX7 synthesizers with flugelhorn, trumpet and saxophones over electric bass and percussion-heavy production reflecting Toth’s newfound disco influences. March 2021 saw Rubblebucket at the Catskills’ Spillway Sound studio with their live band bassist Ryan Dugre, trumpeter/keyboardist Sean Smith and drummer Jeremy Gustin. Toth and Traver also teamed back up with engineer Eli Crews (Tune-Yards, Deerhoof) who along with mixing engineer Claudius Mittendorfer (Parquet Courts, Weezer) helped to round out the record.
Toth further detailed the album along with its lead single and title track:
“‘earth worship’ the song – encapsulates the messages of the album as a whole. As a human being, being in pain is a given. Can we find ‘clean’ ways through the pain in order to break unstainable harmful patterns on individual, community and global ecosystem levels? In his book ‘My Grandmother’s Hands’ Resmaa Menakem defines clean pain as ‘choosing integrity over fear and standing in that fear with integrity and moving towards the unknown.’ Facing fear with integrity is an urgent matter as we are more than individuals. We are a continuum of life across many generations carrying stories, traumas, messages, vibrations and legacies.”
Preview Rubblebucket’s Earth Worship below with the Haoyan of America-directed video for the title track:
