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May 05, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by Yulissa Benitez

New York City via Philadelphia quartet Strange Ranger have announced a new album, Pure Music, and shared a new song from it, “She’s on Fire,” via a music video. Pure Music is due out July 21 via Fire Talk. Check out “She’s on Fire” below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork, as well as the band’s upcoming tour dates.

Strange Ranger is Isaac Eiger, Fiona Woodman, Nathan Tucker, and Fred Nixon. Pure Music is the follow-up to 2019’s Remembering the Rockets album and 2021’s No Light in Heaven mixtape. The album was written while Eiger and Woodman were breaking up and was recorded in a cabin in Upstate New York during a blizzard.

“With a few exceptions, I can’t tell whose production ideas were whose, when I listen back to it,” says Nixon in a press release. “We were literally trapped in this cabin, manically working at all hours, and the energy was crazy, in a fun way.”

“Music makes us transcend the feeling of being alienated from or trapped by the world,” Woodman adds. “I want the experience of listening to Pure Music to be euphoric.”

Of the inspiration behind “She’s on Fire,” Eiger says: “When you’re young, it feels like life has a kind of arc to it and up ahead in the future, there’s some point where all your experiences converge and this fog of confusion will lift and you will have arrived, This is definitely not true and increasingly, music is the steadying hand I lean on when looking for meaning. It provides a spiritualism that feels absent from much of life and I want to be as close to that feeling as possible.”

“She’s on Fire” has a bit of an ’80s vibe at the start before it embraces ’90s shoegaze (a press release cites My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless). The press release also mentions disco, house, and experimental pop as reference points for Pure Music. The album includes “Rain So Hard,” a new song the band shared in March.

Pure Music Tracklist:

1.Rain So Hard
2. She’s On Fire
3. Dream
4. Way Out
5. Blue Shade
6. Blush
7. Wide Awake
8. Ask Me About My Love Life
9. Fantasy
10. Dazed in the Shallows

Strange Ranger Tour Dates: Sat. June 10 - Philadelphia, PA @ TBA w/ Blood & Zeke Ultra
Sat. June 17 - Brooklyn, NY @ Heaven w/Chanel Beads

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