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Feb 21, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Rachel Browne Empty Country

Empty Country is the new solo project of Joseph D’Agostino, formerly of Cymbals Eat Guitars (which broke up in 2017). His self-titled album as Empty Country is due out April 24 via Get Better and now he has shared another song from it, epic six-minute album closer “SWIM.” Listen below.

D’Agostino had this to say about the song in a press release: “SWIM = Someone Who Isn’t Me. It’s a character sketch, as many of the songs on Empty Country are. The narrator is a composite of several people I met or observed while living in Kensington, a neighborhood in Philadelphia gravely affected by the ongoing opioid emergency in the United States. One day my wife Rachel pointed out in passing that some of our neighbors had old faces. She didn’t mean ‘old’ in the sense that they were aging prematurely (though some certainly were), but that they had the faces of Dustbowl-era farmers we had seen in books and films. I began imagining a young man suffering from temporal dysphoria (feeling that one was born into the wrong era and strongly identifying with a bygone time), drinking and otherwise numbing himself to tamp down overwhelming anemoia and sadness. Robbing condos freshly erected in adjoining neighborhoods. Doing harm. Blacking out, driving drunk, hurting those he should love, but simply cannot. Dreaming of leaving forever the bricky mazes of row homes that open into wide empty avenues.”

Empty Country was originally due out last week on Tiny Engines, but when that label came under scrutiny due to late royalty payments to Adult Mom and other artists, D’Agostino decided to find a new label and delay the release to April.

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