The Berries Announce New S/T Album
Out August 29 - Pre-Order / Pre-Save
Shares Lead Single “Angelus”
Performing in LA Tomorrow at Zebulon
By Ajalena Dewolf Moura
The Berries is a pure return to form, delivering Matthew Berry’s strongest take yet on the hallowed tradition of the guitar-wielding singer-songwriter. The LP masterfully engages the tradition’s iconic sentiments of naked Americana, chemical winds whistling over barley shafts, longing-swollen livers and pleading romance, yet suffuses them with a strikingly rich melancholy that is Berry’s alone.
Berry attempts to reclaim some sense of a life worth living in this aftermath, clawing towards a personal faith that can only be found on the other side of an extended battle with the nihilism and self-destruction of our era. As he puts it, “This record came out of a need to break from my old self, to break from a lifestyle that I could no longer bear waking up to everyday. It’s equally fueled by remorse and relief—I can rejoice a bit in having found a renewed purpose, but I had to finally stare down everything that was standing in the way of that sense of dignity first.”
Structurally, The Berries follows in the footsteps of a long lineage of studio-centered pop songcraft, from the comedown genius of Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac to the reverb forests of The War on Drugs. The tracks progress like a series of vignettes, displaying a rare sense of artistic confidence in their willingness to depart from established song-structure conventions—Berry writes impressionistically, always working in service of the spiritual heart of each song, foregrounding each track’s individual character over its ability to fit the mold of accepted genre convention.
On album standout and lead single “Angelus”, Berry gently strings together a series of touchingly considered vocal melodies over the sparse progression, building up a wall of melancholy which feels strikingly Californian in its ability to sonically replicate the desolation of highway overpasses and the apocalyptic quality of staring across the Pacific on a depressingly bright day.
The Berries have taken many shapes over the years. The band began as a series of bedroom project odes to cosmic Americana and fuzzy guitar heroics, which quickly landed Berry a multi-record deal with Run for Cover Records on the strength of his straightforward songwriting ingenuity. Over the years, Berry has assembled a rotating series of proper live and studio bands, who have accompanied him on previous record-length wanderings through country-inflected balladeering (Berryland), distorted, stadium-sized melodrama (Throne of Ivory), and Californian burn-out pop (High Flying Man). On The Berries, however, Berry has fully realized his talents as a self-made studio auteur. The songs emerged rather quickly over a series of intensive writing sessions in the early months of 2025 and were studiously laid to tape that same summer at the home studio of engineer Jimmy Dixon, who also co-produced the record alongside Berry.
After his previous full-length outing, Berry found himself incapable of committing new Berries songs to paper for a number of years, focusing his efforts instead on a string of other projects, including touring with Hotline TNT, his own band Big Bite, and recording material for two new groups, a fuzzed-out rock band titled RAM and a delicately folky acoustic duo dubbed Drug Addict. Ironically, it was only through running headfirst into these other projects that Berry found himself finally able to return to The Berries with a new sense of purpose—as he recounts it, “The Berries had become too many things in one, it had become too unwieldy for me to figure out. By creating other bands that let me clear out some of the ideas that were nagging me, I was able to come back to a simpler understanding of what I’ve always wanted The Berries to be: guitar focused singer-songwriter music with grandiose arrangements and minimal, deeply personal lyrics.” Berry and Dixon were joined in the studio by a formidable cast of longtime friends, including Narrow Head’s Kora Puckett, studio drummer Bryan De Leon (The Drums, Ethel Cain), Color Green’s Corey Madden, and poet / musician Julia Lans Nowak, each of whom contributed to the record’s baroque yet precisely streamlined backing tracks and harmonies.
These songs offer no illusions of being able to undo the bleak confusion of their moment, nor do they attempt to wildly reinvent any longstanding pillars of guitar music sheerly for the sake of novelty. Rather, like all great songwriters, Berry has simply tried to rediscover a place for himself in this world, somewhere that might live up to all the grand promises implied by words like faith, beauty, and belief. At its best, The Berries can count itself amongst the ranks of those rare records that exist to remind us that we aren’t the only ones searching for something greater to believe in—records that exist to remind us that we aren’t alone in our disillusionment, but rather hopelessly together in our desires for a life more worthy of the title of living.
The Berries, self released, will be in stores and available August 29. Catch him in Los Angeles tomorrow night at Zebulon - tickets and info are here.
Album Artwork | Photo By Ajalena Dewolf Moura
The Berries Tracklist:
1 - Sedentary Blues
2 - Vagabond
3 - Angelus
4 - White Peach
5 - Wind Chime
6 - Run You Down
7 - Salt Of The Earth
8 - Lie In The Fire Again
9 - Something Better
10 - Seventh
The Berries Live Dates:
Jul 30: Los Angles, CA - Zebulon
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