Premiere: MAN LEE Shares New Single “Celery” | Under the Radar | Music Blog for the Indie Music Magazine
Saturday, February 8th, 2025  

Premiere: MAN LEE Shares New Single “Celery”

Announce Debut Album Hefty Wimpy Due Out on March 7th

Jan 21, 2025 Photography by Tayler Smith

MAN LEE is the new project of Brooklyn-based duo Sam Reichman and Tim Lee. The pair began writing together and collaborating while they both lived between Richmond, D.C, and Baltimore, and later reconnected in New York. Together the pair’s music dances across the boundaries between art rock and indie pop, with Reichman contributing sweeping vocal performances and Lee bringing his wiry, fuzz-laden guitars into the mix. The band debuted last year with a trio of singles, “Party Favor,” “Chicken,” and “Best One,” and today they’re sharing their latest single, “Celery,” and announcing their forthcoming debut album, Hefty Wimpy, due out on March 7th.

“Celery” trades off between languid sprawls of melody, tightly wound choruses, and playful instrumental interludes, showing off the band at their most infectious and idiosyncratic. The track’s free-floating synth beds and winding guitar tones quickly give way to bursts of indie guitar fuzz, only to fade into a woozy synth detour bolstered by the ever-present hazy bass groove. Restlessness suffuses the band’s every move, yet their psychedelic turns always pivot into a new hook or graceful vocal melody, all laced with sardonic lyrical bite.

Lyrically, the track unpacks alienation in the world of work, with the pair finding themselves at odds with corporate priorities and assumptions. Tim Lee explains of the track, “I’ve always thought it was kind of crazy that we refer to people as consumers, as people who consume—especially when we are the ones being consumed for profit. ‘Celery’ is about looking around and seeing corporations for what they are. It’s about feeling the precarity of work when survival is predicated on the acceptance of business as usual.”

Reichman continues, “There’s this natural ambivalence that slowly creeps in when we, as workers, sense that we’ve been commodified. When I read Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, it opened me to the kinds of aesthetic judgments that I’ve found are most useful in describing my experience of the working world and all of its paradoxes, and I wanted to bring those ideas in.”

Check out the song and video below. Hefty Wimpy is out everywhere on March 7th.



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