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Aug 26, 2022 By Mark Redfern Photography by Buck Meek

Ezra Furman has released a new album, All of Us Flames, today via ANTI-/Bella Union. Now that it’s out you can stream the whole thing here. Stream the album below, followed by her upcoming tour dates.

All of Us Flames includes “Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club,” one its highlights that wasn’t put out as a pre-release single. In the song, Furman sings about identifying with Ally Sheedy’s Allison Reynolds character in John Hughes’ 1985 teen movie classic The Breakfast Club. “The black shit on your eyes, your purse full of junk/I build my world on versions of your VHS visage,” Furman sings. Later Furman, who is a transgender woman, adds: “I watch her flicker on my TV/The teenage girl I never got to be/She’s burning like a torch out in a field that’s all her own.” It’s a haunting and powerful song and you can also stream it below separately.

Furman shared All of Us Flames’s “Point Me Toward the Real” in early March, which was her first single for ANTI-. “Point Me Toward the Real” was about someone getting out of a psychiatric hospital and made it to #1 on our Songs of the Week list. Then “Book of Our Names” followed in April. When All of Us Flames was announced in May, Furman shared its third single, “Forever in Sunset,” via a video. “Forever in Sunset” also made our Songs of the Week list. That was followed by “Lilac and Black,” also one of our Songs of the Week, and “Poor Girl a Long Way From Heaven,” again a successful Songs of the Week contender.

John Congleton (Angel Olsen, Future Islands, Sharon Van Etten) produced All of Us Flames. Furman’s last full-on album was 2019’s Twelve Nudes. In 2021, Furman surprise released a new EP that featured songs she had written for season 3 of the Netflix show Sex Education. It was fittingly titled Sex Education - Songs from Season 3 and featured three new songs, alongside two songs previously released with her former band Ezra Furman & The Harpoons in 2011. Furman has done the music for all three seasons. In 2020, Furman shared the official soundtrack for seasons 1 and 2 of Sex Education, along with a video for the song “Every Feeling.”

All of Us Flames is described as the third part of a trilogy, including 2019’s Twelve Nudes and 2018’s Transangelic Exodus.

“I started to think of trans women as a secret society across the world: scattered everywhere, but so obviously bound together, both in being vulnerable and having a shared vision to change a fundamental building block of patriarchal society,” Furman explained in a previous press release. “I’ve been building my world of queer pals, and it feels like we’re forming a gang.”

Much of the new album was written in the early months of the pandemic. “I had no time alone anymore; my house was super crowded,” Furman said. So she went for drives around Massachusetts to find quiet places to write songs.

“This is a first person plural album,” Furman said. “It’s a queer album for the stage of life when you start to understand that you are not a lone wolf, but depend on finding your family, your people, how you work as part of a larger whole. I wanted to make songs for use by threatened communities, and particularly the ones I belong to: trans people and Jews.”

Check out our 2020 interview with Furman in episode two of our official podcast’s first season.

Read our 2018 interview with Furman.

Ezra Furman Tour Dates:

Mon. Sep. 12 - Montreal, QC @ La Sala Rosa !
Tue. Sep. 13 - Toronto, ON @ Rec Room !
Wed. Sep. 14 - Detroit, MI @ The Loving Touch !
Thu. Sep. 15 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr Small’s !
Fri. Sep. 16 - Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar !
Sun. Sep. 18 - Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts !
Mon. Sep. 19 - Providence, RI @ Fete Ballroom !
Tue. Sep. 20 - Boston, MA @ The Sinclair !
Wed. Sep. 21 - New York, NY @ Webster Hall !
Thu. Sep. 22 - Dover, DE @ Firefly Festival
Mon. Oct. 31 - Bruges, BE @ Cactus Club *
Tue. Nov. 1 - Paris, FR @ Le Trabendo *
Wed. Nov. 2 - Utrecht, NL @ Tivoli Vredenburg *
Thu. Nov. 3 - Hamburg, DE @ Uebel & Gefährlich *
Sat. Nov. 5 - Cologne, DE @ Kulturkirche *
Sun. Nov. 6 - Berlin, DE @ Festsaaal Kreutzberg *
Mon. Nov. 7 - Prague, CZ @ Roxy *
Tue. Nov. 8 - Vienna, AT @ Arena Wien *
Wed. Nov. 9 - Graz, AT @ Dom Im Berg *
Thurs. Nov 10 - Leipzig, DE @ Transcentury Update Festival
Sat. Nov. 12 - Fribourg, CH @ Fri-Son *
Sun. Nov. 13 - Munich, DE @ Freiheitshalle *
Mon. Nov. 14 - Frankfurt, DE @ Zoom *
Wed. Nov. 16 - Brighton, UK @ St Georges Church *
Thu. Nov. 17 - London, UK @ The Roundhouse *
Sat. Nov. 19 - Birmingham, UK @ The Mill *
Mon. Nov. 21 - Manchester, UK @ O2 Ritz *

! w/ Art Moore
*w/ The Golden Dregs

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