Adult Mom Announces New Album ‘Natural Causes’ Out May 9 Via Epitaph
Today, indie-rock quartet Adult Mom – Stevie Knipe, Olivia Battell, Allegra Eidinger and Lily Mastrodimos - announce ‘Natural Causes’, their fourth studio album due out on May 9th via Epitaph Records. Throughout its nine tracks, Natural Causes meshes the buoyancy and eclecticism of R.E.M.'s jangle-pop with Lucinda Williams' soul-cutting depths. While shining a spotlight on Adult Mom's most expressive and exuberant songs to date, it also offers some of their sparsest and bleakest.
The band also shares its airy lead single "Crystal". Inspired by early R.E.M., old folk standards, and harsher nu-metal tones, it’s adorned with Lily Mastrodimos's banjo and mandolin to heighten songwriter Stevie Knipe's lyrics about tamping down their own queerness while stuck inside a deadening relationship. “” Crystal” is written from the perspective of feeling trapped while still being seen in a distorted way. It’s about knowing yourself but not being ready to face it.”
“Crystal”
Since the release of their debut album a decade ago, Adult Mom has wholeheartedly grappled with pain, frustration, and disillusionment, all while offering a glimpse of hopeful resilience. On their fourth record Natural Causes, Knipe, the group's principal songwriter and lead vocalist, wrote the songs between 2020 and 2023 during a period of both global tumult and personal upheaval. The result is the embracing of a new emotional register: rage that burns so bright you can light your way by it.
Arriving in the wake of Knipe undergoing intensive treatment for cancer in their late twenties, the experience brought them into direct confrontation with their own mortality. As they started writing songs from that vantage, they found they could stare down difficult memories of abuse and toxic relationships with a new ferocity.
Though Knipe has been out as queer and non-binary since Adult Mom's debut, their relationship to their identity, like many queer artists', has evolved and revealed itself in long waves. They came out as a lesbian after writing Adult Mom's lauded 2021 album Driver, and many of the songs on Natural Causes cut through the knots of compulsory heterosexuality and coerced gender normativity. Getting more deeply in touch with your own queerness can feel liberating and thrilling; it can also thaw out oceans of anger you never knew you had from all the times you had to stay alienated from yourself to survive.
"Thematically, I got more comfortable with getting darker," says Knipe. "I knew there were things I wanted to explore that I didn’t get to on Driver, like the traumatic side of trying to unravel all this learned straightness. There were things happening interpersonally where I was like, OK, now I need to really tackle the tough parts of this process."
After years of deep friendship and creative collaboration, the members of Adult Mom cultivated an environment of powerful trust that allowed them to play, experiment, and take risks while recording. They invited additional musicians to join them at Artfarm Recording studio in New York's Hudson Valley in order to weave orchestral flourishes into the record. James Richardson stopped by to play horns, Maeve Schallert layered strings, and Andrew Hoben -- Knipe's former neighbor -- contributed piano. The band folded each of them into their communal artistic practice, inviting them to compose and arrange their parts onsite rather than working from pre-written sheet music.
"It was a very communist practice of making a record. It was the whole band and our engineer Chance [Milestone], and we were all making choices as a unit," says Knipe. "Every guitar tone, every sound that you hear was all decided together. We’re all the collective producer. I’ve never made a record like that before."
With Natural Causes, Adult Mom hammer home the revelation that self-knowledge is not a destination. It's an active movement, and it's one you can't embark on by yourself. Each of us emerges, suffers, and heals in relationship to other people; to really get to know ourselves, we must reach beyond our own edges.