New Music: Antietam – Every Other Star

Ahead of their fourteenth album The Counting Game, New York underground icons Antietam have revealed featured track Every Other Star.

Formed in 1984 and a vital part of the CBGB legend, Antietam wear that historical weight lightly. The trio have never settled for repeating what they did before, with a back catalogue that encompasses improv to noise, and now in their fifth decade as a going concern, they still have a thirst for adventure.

Every Other Star is quietly experimental, somehow ambient within its rock setting, with vocals that are haunting in their unadorned and exposed emotional resonances. It doesn’t fit into any one genre or scene, but then Antietam have never seemed to chase conformity or success. If that means they continue to give us music as aching and darkly angelic as this, who are we to argue with that?

“When getting older, it is easy to tally up the prosaic and dial out the magical,” says Antietam’s Tara Key. It’s not really about loss of faith or hope or other intangibles with more indistinct edges, but it is partly about loss for sure.”

“So, sliding into fall every year, looking for Orion is a touchstone for me. Yes, it is the easiest constellation to spot, so there’s no flex in sighting it. If you are talking mythology, Orion’s myth is problematic; I prefer the hunter to the stalker of the Pleiades.

“But on the first night I walk outside and see it, I feel like I am connecting to timelessness: I remember 45-year-old me mixing Victory Park at the beach house and stumbling outside to see it over the sea. I remember six-year-old me drawing shapes on the fogged-up window of a school bus coming home from a night football game, Orion appearing within my design.

“I remember 69-year-old me coming out of Steve Silverstein’s studio in Brooklyn while mixing this record and exclaiming to him, ‘There it is!’ I remember everyone who is gone. And for a moment it all fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, and I am overcome with gratitude for what I have seen and who I have travelled all this with, and I feel ungrounded in a very potent and positive way. Like magic.”

The Counting Game is out on the 4th of September on Dromedary Records and is available for pre-order on Bandcamp in vinyl and CD formats. Make sure you get all the latest band and album updates by following Antietam on Facebook or Instagram.

Header image by Ellen Qbertplaya