NEW GERMAN CINEMA shares new single "Swirling Pain" taken from new album of icy pop 'Pain Will Polish Me', out March 27 on Felte.

NEW GERMAN CINEMA - Shares new single "Swirling Pain" - Second single from forthcoming album    ‘Pain Will Polish Me’ out March 27 on Felte - Debut solo album from Fear of Men’s Jessica Weiss

Photo credit: Conor J Clarke   Following the announcement of her debut solo album 'Pain Will Polish Me', today New German Cinema, the solo project of Fear of Men songwriter and vocalist Jessica Weiss, shares the record’s second single, “Swirling Pain”. The slower, brooding, icy pop track offers a deeper glimpse into the album’s emotional core. The album lands March 27th via Felte. Following the beat-led single “My Mistake” featuring Merchandise's Carson Cox, new track “Swirling Pain” stands as one of the album’s emotional anchors, built around restrained production, glacial atmospheres and intimate vocal delivery. Weiss describes it as central to the spirit of the record: “Swirling Pain is my favourite song on the record. It lives in that strange Kafkaesque space between longing and withdrawal, where closeness feels both necessary and dangerous at the same time. Jag, my bandmate, and I made this video when we were staying in Berlin last summer - it started off as a take on Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon from 1943 - a piece of cinema history that feels perfectly suspended from time, and really captures the fragmentation of self that comes with memory looping back on itself. We’ve stripped that back to focus on repetition, dislocation and that uneasy sense of watching yourself from the outside.” "Swirling Pain" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nthg0-TGqlk ‘Pain Will Polish Me’ album links: https://felte.lnk.to/new-german-cinema Weiss carries lyrical precision and emotional intensity into the stormy dark-pop gems on her debut solo album. ‘Pain Will Polish Me’ has been five years in the making, stretched between London and LA, built from late-night files, long silences and the quiet persistence of trying to finish something beautiful. Produced with Alex DeGroot (Zola Jesus, Cate Le Bon), it feels both forensic and devotional, the product of someone who doesn’t rush catharsis. It presents both solitary and connective, as if built from long-distance transmissions between two dream states.   Weiss calls the album a meditation on pop and European art-house auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It tracks the ways intimacy and control fold into one another until it’s impossible to tell where one ends. The songs are about the parts of yourself that dissolve in love, and the small acts of violence that come with being known. They move through claustrophobic relationships, obsession, surrender, cycles of suffering that start to feel like devotion. The language is pop but the feeling is something stranger, colder, more interior.   The songs on ‘Pain Will Polish Me’ move in shadow. Layers of synth, vocal and guitar fold over one another, drawing from the cinematic tension of Fassbinder’s New German Cinema and the quiet dissonance of modern Berlin, where Weiss recorded fragments of the record, drifting between places that carry uneasy ghosts. Between dinner conversations about the city’s buried history and the surreal comfort of its present, she found herself tracing the outlines of love and loss, identity and dissolution. “Germany’s history is everywhere but it’s unsaid,” she notes. “Fassbinder brought it into view. I wanted to approach the same sense of unease through sound.”   The album artwork picks up these themes, hovering between the everyday mundanity of a Fassbinder domestic scene, and something less recognisable, punctuated by surreal elements that move us into dreamscape, both familiar and disquieting. The shell and sea reference Botticelli's Venus: a figure born from sea foam created when Uranus’s severed genitals fell into the ocean - an image of creation through destruction. The shell becomes her vessel of birth, representing transformation, protection and fertility - the bridge between divine creation and human life. Weiss extends this theme of renewal to the personal; her baby daughter's babbles feature on the record.   Weiss has long been fascinated by the seam between pop and theory, art and feeling. While Fear of Men continue to work on their next record, this solo project opens up her own private language- a collection that feels at once personal and archival, haunted and alive. Between finishing a Masters in Early Modern Literature at Oxford, starting a PhD, moving countries and jobs many times, she’s been piecing together a body of work that sits somewhere between diary, research and séance.   It’s an album about losing yourself in order to see what’s left. A document of love as obsession, repetition, survival.  A meditation on love as both mirror and undoing, crafted in fragments, then pieced together into something whole.   New German Cinema live dates: 28 February - London, UK @ Sebright Arms (Free show - tickets here) 15 April - Brighton, UK @ The Folklore Rooms ‘Pain Will Polish Me’ track list: 01. Sub Rosa 02. Swirling Pain - Lyric video 03. Being Dead 04. I Become Heavy 05. Hera's Theme I 06. Eyes 07. Water Drops 08. Hera's Theme II 09. My Mistake - Video 10. All That Heaven Allows 11. Pain Will Polish Me 12. Perfect Secret    ‘Pain Will Polish Me’ album artwork (click for high res):   Links: https://www.instagram.com/newgermancinema  https://newgermancinema.bandcamp.com