Pottery have detailed their debut LP – Welcome To Bobby’s Motel – out April 10th via Partisan Records, and shared the album’s double-decker single ‘Texas Drums Pt I & II’.
A celebration of rhythm and groove, Welcome To Bobby’s Motel invites you to set yourself free, veering from highbrow motorik instrumentation to moments of playful discord. ‘Texas Drums Pt I & II’ combines cultish chants with a trippy wall-of-noise breakdown, paying tribute to the simple joys of percussion. The song is accompanied by a music video (for Pt. I only) that gives a surrealist look into the lives of a pair of unibrowed brothers. The clip is directed by the band’s Paul Jacobs and Jacob Shepansky alongside Meagan Callen in collaboration with Montreal based filmmaker Charlie Coote.
Following on from their upcoming sold-out London show at The Windmill in Brixton on Feb 26th, the Montreal 5-piece have also confirmed a global headline tour which includes a bunch of UK and EU dates across May and June culminating in a June 11th London show at the Tufnell Park Dome. Please see further below for a full itinerary.
UK Tour Dates:
Feb 26th | London, UK – Brixton Windmill [SOLD OUT]
June 8th | Brighton, UK – Chalk
June 9th | Manchester, UK – Deaf Institute
June 10th | Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club
June 11th | London, UK – The Dome, Tufnell Park
Welcome To Bobby’s Motel was produced by Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, Snail Mail) and recorded at Montreal’s Break Glass studio. Although he occupies a central role within the album’s 11 tracks, it should be noted that Bobby is not technically a real person, and Bobby’s Motel is not a real place. Here’s how the band explains the makeup of this psychedelic dreamworld:
Who is “Bobby,” you ask?
Enter Pottery. Enter Paul Jacobs, Jacob Shepansky, Austin Boylan, Tom Gould, and Peter Baylis. Enter the smells, the cigarettes, the noise, their van Mary, their friend Luke, toilet drawings, Northern California, Beatles accents, Taco Bell, the Great Plains, and hot dogs. Enter love and hate, angst and happiness, and everything in between. Beginning as an inside joke between the band members, Bobby and his “motel” have grown into so much more. They’ve become the all-encompassing alt-reality that the band built themselves, for everyone else. So, in essence, Bobby is Pottery and his motel is wherever they are.
But really, Bobby is a pilot, a lumberjack, a stay at home dad, and a disco dancer that never rips his pants. He’s a punching bag filled with comic relief. He laughs in the face of day-to-day ambiguity, as worrying isn’t worth it to Bobby. There’s a piece of him in everyone, there to remind us that things are probably going to work out, maybe. He’s you. He’s him. He’s her. He’s them. Bobby is always there, painted in the corner, urging you to relax and forget about your useless worries. And his motel? Well, the motel is life. It might not be clean, and the curtains might not shut all the way. The air conditioner might be broken, and the floors might be stained. But that’s okay, because you don’t go to Bobby’s Motel for the glamour and a good night’s sleep, the minibar, or the full-service sauna. You go to Bobby’s Motel to feel, to escape, to remember, to distract. You go for the late nights and early mornings, good times and the bad. You might spend your entire life looking for Bobby’s Motel and just when you think you will never find it, you realize you’ve been there all along. It’s filthy and amazing and you dance, and you love it.
