Hurts To Laugh

Hurts To Laugh will be released Friday 10th April via Dot Dash / Remote Control. To celebrate the new single and EP Methyl Ethel will be supporting Peter, Bjorn & John on their American tour dates throughout March and April. On return to Australia, Methyl Ethel will tour in solo mode at intimate venues in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Hurts To Laugh marks the ongoing output of Methyl Ethel producer and multi-instrumentalist Jake Webb’s restless mind. Time and again he’s proven that while there’s no distinction between music and art, psychologically speaking there is a difference between feeling and emotion. One is a conscious response to a set of circumstances, the other is the unconscious conditions of our very being that only occasionally surfaces through feelings. Hurts To Laugh excavates this ambiguous site, implied by its very title. You can laugh so hard it hurts - pure joy. Or laugh despite the pain - despair. These paradoxes run throughout the EP, as well as everything that came before. 'Majestic AF' stumbles into its bubbling oscillator and analogue polyrhythms, while a kick-free drumbeat marches right into an atonal synth melody supporting Webb’s equally idiosyncratic falsetto. Hurts To Laugh was recorded at the same time as 2019's Triage and both releases feature cover art by Sydney-based artist Loribelle Spriovski. Triage was Webb's third and final album in a trilogy of obliquely expressed relationship drama, starting with 2015’s Oh Inhuman Spectacle which features certified ARIA Gold single 'Twilight Driving'. 2017's Everything Is Forgotten birthed the sensational single 'Ubu' which is now certified ARIA Platinum. Methyl Ethel is a project that’s the brainchild of a single mind—writer, performer and producer Webb—while also being a live band of five members. It makes music that draws from myriad influences and a history of new wave and indie rock, while sounding like its own thing entirely. Both familiar and alien, intimate and aloof, you never quite know what you’re in for, but the trip is bound to be enchanting.

The Perth art-rockers crank up the melodrama (with battle metaphors aplenty) and come off like an indie Muse with this experimental EP