Zen Mother announce genre-bending new album, Millenial Garbage Preach, out on October 2nd via The Flenser

One of the decade’s most compelling, genre-bending duos, Zen Mother are returning with a new LP, entitled Millennial Garbage Preach. Set for release on October 2nd via The Flenser, the seven new tracks that comprise Zen Mother’s debut for the Bay Area-based label traverse experimental rock, avant-garde psych-punk, industrial dirge and more. The album’s first single, “Order”, is intense and abstract – brooding instrumentation is fused with hauntingly beautiful vocals, and the end result is an appropriate glimpse of Millennial Garbage Preach as a whole.

Zen Mother, which features core duo Monika Khot (Nordra, Daughters) and Adam Wolcott Smith (The Growlers, Invisible Hand), have unveiled a spellbinding music video for “Order”. Directed by Mu Tunc, the video is akin to a grimy fairytale of dance macabre – a captivating short dance-music film about an ordinary young woman living inside an old castle without any contact from the outside world. The storyline itself is a nod to cult classic film Grey Gardens. Zen Mother explain: “Mu Tunc created this film in a wasteland of capitalistic depravity a couple hours outside of Istanbul. His caliber of aesthetic and vision as a director is unrivaled and the love and friendship everyone poured into the making of this is true magic”.

Produced by Randall Dunn (Marissa Nadler, Sunn O))), Kayo Dot), Millennial Garbage Preach is Zen Mother’s third full-length release. The group learned how to distill the most potent aspects of their sound through years of vagabond touring and have refined their approach accordingly. That ongoing refinement hasn’t stifled Zen Mother’s love for the grandiose, as evidenced by their acclaimed original score to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain (released in 2019 under the title The Ascent). “I think we are possibly less experimental in our compositional style now”, Khot says of their current work. Zen Mother continues, “We came to our good friend Randall Dunn with fully produced demos for Millennial Garbage Preach with the 5k frequencies blaring, the wrong elements too high in the mix and Randall produced this record into the dark gauze of anguish it needed to be. Tears were shed, Sheridan Riley (our drummer) just flew in from Japan two days before, Monika had strep throat the whole time… we all felt like we were on acid throughout the making of the record”.

Zen Mother’s trio formation skews the project towards more formal songwriting, but also allows the band to indulge in their lofty ambitions and visionary impulses. The curious nature and multi-faceted skills of the members makes Millennial Garbage Preach an almost untraceable effort, but Zen Mother never loses focus, even when it reaches for the esoteric. They continue, “I think you can hear some of the mania in Millennial Garbage Preach, after all music isn’t created in a vacuum and you’ll never be in a spot where everything comes together completely and succinctly. It’s the struggle that makes something totally worthwhile, and for us this record is a document of an imperfect time, and a totem of where we came from.”

Millennial Garbage Preach is out October 2nd via The Flenser and the album is available for pre-order here. More music and news to surface soon.

Photo credit: Ephriam Nagler