San Fermin, Pearla

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Denny Renshaw

Ellis Ludwig-Leone of San Fermin.

Doors: 7 PM / Show: 8 PM;  Seated Show, $30adv $35DOS

media release: San Fermin have announced their forthcoming collaborative compilation entitled In This House. The compilation — which will be released via their label, Better Company, on December 10 — will feature collaborations with Nico Muhly, Sorcha Richardson, Thao Nguyen, Wye Oak, Attacca Quartet, The Districts, and Wild Pink.

Alongside the announcement today, San Fermin share their collab with Wye Oak, "My First Life," premiered by Brooklyn Vegan. The single also comes with a visualizer made by Marty McPherson (Samia, Alvvays, Calpurnia, PUP). 

San Fermin made their debut with the self-titled 2013 album hailed by NPR as “one of the year’s most ambitious, evocative, and moving records.” The band’s sophomore effort Jackrabbit arrived in 2015, debuting at #8 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. As the follow-up to Jackrabbit, the band released Belong, the 2017 release praised by The New Yorker for “often sound[ing] like a wall of flowers blooming at once.” With the release of The Cormorant in 2020, San Fermin have now sold out shows worldwide, appeared at major festivals like Lollapalooza, and opened for the likes of St. Vincent, The National, Arctic Monkeys, and alt-J.

Later in 2020, San Fermin bandleader Ellis Ludwig-Leone, lead vocalist Allen Tate, and their manager Thomas Winkler launched Better Company, a record label dedicated to creating a wide-ranging community of musicians with an emphasis on collaboration. Born from this concept of collaboration, In This House started with a single song of the same name written with Nico Muhly and Attacca Quartet and took on a greater meaning and larger format as the pandemic arrived. Ludwig-Leone explains, "when the pandemic arrived, the idea of a shared space was drawn in even more absolute terms as something more valuable and fragile than many of us had imagined. To battle the growing feeling of isolation, I tried to embrace the sentiment of the times, and invited some of my favorite musicians to write with me, long distance, in an effort to bring back a feeling of community and shared experience."

Each of the songs that followed went through a unique writing process. “My First Life,” written with Wye Oak, started as a poem Jenn had written, which I then set to a melody and wrapped in some of Andy’s musical textures. “Dream Yourself Awake,” written with Thao, started as a set of gentle string arrangements and ended as a freaky banger. “Nothingness,” written with The Districts, was pieced together section-by-section, Exquisite Corpse-style, and then finished together in a studio—the only song in this collection that featured any in-person writing at all.

With the release of In This House, Ludwig-Leone shares "I’m proud to see all of these discrete songs collected in one place. Each one was an experiment, a time stamp of the moment it was written in a quickly changing landscape. And though they are purposefully distinct, there’s a throughline that emerges when they’re taken together: themes of community, home, lives left behind. There is despair and anger but also a warmth that comes from accommodating other voices alongside your own. As the opening lines of “In This House” ask: “bring what you can hold / I can make a space.”'

In This House marks the end of Better Company's inaugural year and features collaborations with: Attacca Quartet, The Districts, Nico Muhly, Lisel, Sorcha Richardson, Thao (of Thao and the Get Down Stay Down), Wild Pink, and Wye Oak. It will be released on Better Company on December 10, 2021.