Sheer Mag, Dusk

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Natallie Piserchio

The band Sheer Mag.

Sheer Mag

$20 ($17 adv.).

media release: Sheer Mag break significant musical ground on their forthcoming album Playing Favorites, elevating their signature approach to rock and roll to lushly cinematic new heights. Their latest single “Moonstruck” lives up to its titular reference of Hollywood-sized surprise romance, spooling out a charming story of desire. Guitarist and lyricist Matt Palmer tells, “‘Moonstruck’ is about how invigorating it is to have a new crush. After too long lost in the wilderness, it's gratifying to find a beacon of tenderness to help reorient yourself in the maze of love. Written in 2021 and originally intended for a disco EP, ‘Moonstruck’ has been reworked as a more expansive and lush arrangement and features some of our favorite guitar work on the new record.” 

The accompanying video for “Moonstruck” was inspired by Rush's "Limelight" visuals which featured footage from their wintertime recording sessions at Le Studio in Quebec. Sheer Mag enlisted director and longtime friend Ryan Schnackenberg (Cult Images) to bring it to life.

Sheer Mag have labored to carve out a discernibly singular position within the canon of contemporary rock: toggling with ease between the refined flourishes of a “connoisseur’s band” and the ecstatic colloquialism of populist songwriting—yet displaying no strict loyalty to either camp—their sound, while oft-referenced, is unmistakably and immediately recognizable as theirs alone. On Playing Favorites, Sheer Mag’s third full-length and first with Third Man Records, the band capitalize on a decade’s worth of devotion to their own collective spirit—a spirit refined in both the sweaty trenches of punk warehouses and the larger-than-life glamour of concert halls—emerging with a dense work of gripping emotions, massive hooks, and masterfully constructed power-pop anthems. This is the record the Philadelphian rock and roll four-piece has always been destined to make.

Playing Favorites expands with a sense of undeniable vitality, buoyed by rock and roll’s singular capacity to channel a relentless compassion for human life. While at times marked by an intensified sense of melancholy, this newest offering takes stock of the confusing flow of daily life without moralizing, refusing to fall into antagonistic cynicism. Sheer Mag leans into the chaotic thrall of city living, of a life subdivided by the jagged highs and lows of bars, parties, and nightlife culture, with sweetly empathetic remove. 

The album burns with a sweetened gratitude for the lot one has been given in life: the luck of coming up punk; the luck of living an unalienated life; the luck of feeling love, and losing love. Sheer Mag began to work in earnest on their follow up to 2019’s A Distant Call in the summer of 2021, which they originally imagined would take the shape of a tautly constructed 4-song disco EP. Before long, the band realized this new material would perhaps be better served within the context of a fully fleshed out rock LP, bracketed by the support of a wider array of juxtaposing psychic moods and sonic textures. 

Over a six-month stretch spanning the fall of 2022 to the winter of 2023, guitarist Kyle Seely and his brother Hart Seely (bass) set about tracking the instrumentals for the record, resetting their studio configuration each week in order to impose a more tailored, multi-session atmosphere upon the record’s acoustic landscape. Palmer rejoined vocalist Tina Halladay in Philadelphia the following spring to write and record the vocals for Playing Favorites, which depart rather markedly from the band’s prior material, placing an added emphasis on pronouncedly existential, interpersonal storytelling and ornate background harmonies. 

Playing Favorites is undoubtedly a record by the same Sheer Mag that audiences of all stripes have spent the last decade falling in love with. In fact, for all of its sonic departures and evolutions, this record is perhaps the most “Sheer Mag” release yet. Not so much a return to form, but rather a realization of those greatest promises that the band has up until now only hinted at. With Playing Favorites, Sheer Mag cater to their tastes and their tastes alone: so long as they continue to do so, the future of rock and roll, that great human tradition, is in the best of hands.

Sheer Mag embark on an extensive headlining tour this Spring which kicks off in D.C. late March and routes them coast to coast through early May. Today they've confirmed performances at NYC's Bowery Ballroom, a hometown show at Philadelphia's First Unitarian Church and more. See below for a full list of dates.

“The acclaimed Philly outfit enter their 10th year with a sound that’s more defined than ever… guitarist Kyle Seely is dialed into his band’s beguiling breadth of boogie, southern rock, ‘80s metal, and power pop sounds like never before.” GUITAR WORLD

“[Sheer Mag] knows well the virtues of short, punchy, effective songs that seem designed for a corner bar’s jukebox. The band’s singer, Tina Halladay, shines on ‘Playing Favorites’” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“one of the best pure rock ‘n’ roll bands in America right now, with an infectious commitment to big riffs and uproarious live shows” PASTE

“Philly rock heroes Sheer Mag had a singular mission for their new song: to make a straight up rock banger. They succeeded!” NYLON