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Mar 20, 2025 By Issa Nasatir

Dirty Projectors (the project led by David Longstreth) have shared a new song, “Bank On,” ahead of their forthcoming album Song of the Earth, which is a collaboration with European orchestral collective s t a r g a z e. Song of the Earth is due out April 4 via Nonesuch/New Amsterdam. Find the video for the new single below.

Dirty Projectors are David Longstreth, Mike Johnson, Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, and Olga Bell. S t a r g a z e is an orchestral collective founded by conductor André de Ridder in 2013. Longstreth wrote the album, which is performed by Dirty Projectors and s t a r g a z e. Their newest collaboration, “Bank On,” is described in a press release as “a darkly humorous reflection on the curdled relationship between capitalism and manufactured complacence in the face of the wholesale destruction of our planet.”

Longstreth had this to say about the song in the press release: “I can imagine the title of this song in the voice of Sean Penn’s Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High: ‘Bank on, bro.’ The title is short for a phrase in the lyrics, ‘bank on apocalypse:’ short selling our collective investment in a livable future in the hopes of making a buck in the meantime. It’s kind of a Shock Doctrine idea. The chorus is a reverse-reverb call to prayer from the future, invoking horror and regret over our failed custodianship of the planet. The central image of ‘Bank On’ is of one of those big granite-block, doric-columns emblems of institutional permanence built on eroding sand. Banks on banks on banks. Keep swaying the kelpbeds in Babylon. Bank on, bro.”

In 2020 Dirty Projectors released 5EPs, a 20-song anthology that collected five EPs the band released that year, all via Domino. Dirty Projectors’ last regular full-length album was 2018’s Lamp Lit Prose.

S t a r g a z e’s last LP was 2023’s arone x s t a r g a z e, a collaboration with Arone Dyer.

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