e4444e Announces New Album Authentic Natural Tradition; Shares 'Liberation'

[Naarm/Melbourne – Thursday, January 30, 2024] e4444e – the moniker of experimental Awabakal/Newcastle multi-instrumentalist Romy Church – announces his fourth full-length record, Authentic Natural Tradition, due Friday, May 30 via Dinosaur City. With the news comes lead single, 'Liberation' alongside a Thommy Crowe-directed music video.

On ‘Liberation’, frenetic percussion, windy chords and elliptical lyrics come together to produce an ecstatic declaration of freedom, confusion and doubt. Church lets all these feelings sit together and mingle, exposing how the hope for transcendence comes with great emotions of fear and terror. The song is more so about the striving and reaching for liberation than the actual feeling of liberation itself. “Liberation hangs like silk just past the horizon”, Church sings. The percussion was crafted through a happy accident: Church accidentally hitting his guitar and recording the sound. Liking its chaotic exultation, Church decided to hit it a few more times, record it and then create a loop.

The accompanying music video, directed by Thommy Crowe, visually complements this sentiment, utilising 3D and 2D animation, scanned plants and pencil sketches. The video depicts Church cycling through a mystical world, encountering surreal landscapes and creatures, mirroring the song's exploration of inner turmoil and the search for meaning.

"There is always more to see if you look further," Crowe explains. "The spirits are dancing. The moonlight shines bright like daytime. This is all I am, but I can be part of it all."

Church shares, "[Liberation] is a bittersweet mix of exultation and yearning. Yearning for what I personally think (in this moment) everyone wants deep down in some way. In the clip, there is a narrator ‘riding’ the song; pointing at certain things, but for me, the deeper meaning and feelings come from the melodies and the rhythms. The kind of out of time, driving percussion and the high-picked guitar melodies reaching out for the horizon." He adds, "[The video] aligns with how I feel about the song a lot with the big open sky, but also all these oceanic movements, and a ‘self’ navigating the whole thing. The home-brewed feel of the animation is in line with the way the song was constructed too."

Authentic Natural Tradition might be Church’s most direct statement, with the cloudy arrangements of his previous record (I Spend All Day Drawing a Circle) cleared to make way for breathy vocals, bittersweet lyrics and delicate guitars and percussion. On this album, Church’s reflections float to the surface of his tracks, clear-eyed and bracing. Lyrics are not buried deep into the mix, but slice through. Meanwhile, the album’s lyrics push against linearity, playing with the haphazard nature of dreams and the subconscious. Celestial forces, strange associations and juxtaposing images abound on Authentic Natural Tradition, but the record never feels lofty or out of grasp. Rather, Church’s abstract tales feel grounded, through their visceral emotions and invocations of the natural world.

Like I Spend All Day Drawing a Circle, Church recorded, performed and mixed the album by himself, with a few friends dropping by to add in live drums and guitar hooks. The title is a sly joke – Church wanting to put aside alternative tunings and revisit more simple chord hooks. He was also poking fun at himself. As he says, the album reflects the ‘tradition’ he’s created over his past four records, with Church becoming increasingly aware of his own fixations, themes and sounds. Yet, Authentic Natural Tradition sees Church expanding his palette like never before, with dips into psych-rock, ghostly techno and sprawling country.

Authentic Natural Tradition continues e4444e’s prolific and expansive output, joining last year’s Soft Sighing Dusk I Never See You, I Spend All Day Drawing a Circle (2023), Autumnal Eve (2021) and Australian Music Prize-nominated Coldstream Road (2020), as well as a string of self-released EPs and stand-alone singles. Cited by The Guardian as “one of the best young artists in the country”, his work has been met with widespread acclaim from NME, Rolling Stone Australia, The Music, The Australian and Fashion Journal among others, with regular plays and praise across FBi Radio (Album of the Week x 4), 2SER (rotation), Triple R, 2SER and more. Live, e4444e has shared stages with Emma Russack, Godtet, thatboykwame and Body Type, among others, plus landed a coveted slot on innovative Gadigal land/Sydney venue, Phoenix Central Park’s Season III program.

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