Earlier this morning, Durham’s Jenn Wasner (Flock of Dimes) announced that a new album, Head of Roses, is headed our way in April. Wasner, who makes heartbreakingly diaphanous electro-pop, writes in the album notes that Roses is a project about “having your heart broken at the same time as you’re breaking someone else’s.”
2020 was an ambitious year for Wasner, who is one half of indie rock duo Wye Oak and moved to Durham from Baltimore in 2015. First there was a Dimes EP, Like So Much Desire, which was released around the same time that she signed with Sub Pop. This was followed by a Wye Oak EP, No Horizon, a collaboration with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. The ten-track Head of Roses, due April 2, is her second LP as a solo act.
News of the album comes with a video single, “Two,” a bright, gauzy song awash in clarity and the desire for connection. It was produced by Nick Sanborn (Sylvan Esso) at Betty’s in Chapel Hill, and mixed and engineered by a handful of other locals, including Ari Picker. Head of Roses will feature locals acts alongside collaborators Meg Duffy and Bon Iver’s Matt McCaughan.
“[“Two” is] about trying to reconcile the desire to maintain a sense of personal autonomy and freedom with the need to connect deeply with others,” Wasner writes about the single. “It’s about struggling to feel at home in a body, and learning how to accept that the projection of self that you show to others will always be incomplete.”
Watch the video for “Two” below.
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