Adult Mom Release ‘Natural Causes’ Out Now Via Epitaph
Since the release of their debut album a decade ago, the music of indie-rock quartet Adult Mom has wholeheartedly grappled with pain, frustration, and disillusionment, all while providing glimmers of hopeful resilience. On Natural Causes, their fourth album out today via Epitaph, they embrace a new emotional register: rage that burns so bright you can light your way by it.
Stream Natural Causes in full HERE
Described by frontperson Stevie Knipe (they/them) as “an imagined revenge plot,” Adult Mom also share the nostalgic visual to focus track “Headline” - WATCH HERE
“’Headline’ was written while I was detangling heteronormativity and was spending a lot of time looking back on past experiences,” they explain. “I’ll never forget the jealousy I felt watching boys kiss the girls I didn’t know that I liked in high school and early college, and the rage that ensued when they would be taken advantage of.”
Natural Causes was written between 2020 and 2023 during a period of both global tumult and personal upheaval for the band’s founder and primary songwriter, Stevie Knipe. Meshing the buoyancy and eclecticism of R.E.M.'s jangle-pop with Lucinda Williams' soul-cutting depths, the record arrives in the wake of intensive cancer treatment that Knipe endured in their late twenties. An experience that brought them into direct confrontation with their own mortality, as they started writing songs from that vantage, they found the strength to 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 the lauded 2021 album Driver, with many of the songs on Natural Causes cutting 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.
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.