Photo by Eleanor Petry.
In honor of Bandcamp Friday we’re releasing 25 bundles of Julia Shapiro’s Zorked LP on exclusive watermelon color vinyl paired with her band Chastity Belt’s Fake / Fear 7″ on translucent green with red splatter vinyl. The bundle comes with an 11″ x 17″ Zorked poster.
Order the Zorked + Fake / Fear bundle HERE.
Chastity Belt – Fake / Fear
Over a decade into their existence, Chastity Belt remains true to itself. It’s a joke told in a college town that became a living, breathing rock band. It’s a quartet of four friends–Julia Shapiro, Lydia Lund, Gretchen Grimm, and Annie Truscott–in dialogue with each other and the world. Across four albums to dazzling effect, their work stands as a deeply moving extended meditation on parties, relationships, power dynamics, sincerity, and aging–all delivered without even a hint of heavy-handedness.
“Fake” / “Fear” the band’s new single, picks up where their self-titled fourth album left off. “Fear”’s snarling riff, soaring chorus, and Moby-Dick imagery came to singer and guitarist Lydia Lund after she dreamt of what she described as “gut-wrenching fear” caused by a “neverending series of unknowns.”
After recording instrumentals with engineer Samur Khouja, Lund tracked her vocals while visiting her parents, repeating the chorus, “It’s just the fear,” over and over with increasing, soaring intensity.
In her words: “My mom knocked on the door and asked, ‘Is there anything you want to talk to me about? Is there something you’re afraid of?’ At that point, I realized she thought I was doing some kind of primal scream therapy. In a way, I guess I am…honestly, feels pretty good!”
Like “Fear,” a mantra sits at the heart of “Fake,” on which Julia Shapiro examines her inability to be vulnerable. “I’m a fake,” she sings repeatedly, as she takes stock of a situation in which all language broke down and communication failed. “The song is about not being able to be honest with someone and say what you mean,” she explains. “I wrote it because I couldn’t express in words how I was feeling.”
These two songs emphasize the dual nature of Chastity Belt: interior and exterior, catharsis and introspection, play and hesitation. Yet more than anything else, they are the work of four friends with the unique ability to render heady emotional territory lighter than air and the power to make that feeling universal.
Released December 3, 2021.
Julia Shapiro – Zorked
Zorked (adj.) – what happens when you end up thunderbaked, as in extremely stoned–or in any situation where you feel not sober. You can feel so tired you’re zorked. In fact, any state, so long as you’re a little out of it, qualifies. And Julia Shapiro, of Chastity Belt, Childbirth, and Who Is She?—much like everyone on this earth with a pulse—was zorked on more than one occasion in 2020. In March, she packed up her things and traded Seattle’s late-winter gloom for the perennial sunshine and seemingly endless opportunity of Los Angeles only to be forced into near-total isolation. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, she began working on her second solo album, Zorked. On the resulting batch of songs, we’re given Julia’s vision of Los Angeles: a wasteland melting in slow-motion, a place to commune with ghosts and warped legacies.
Living within earshot of a man who spent his entire 2020 singing karaoke for over 10 hours a day, Julia could write, record, and play an album’s worth of instruments without fear of noise complaints. Her roommate Melina Duterte (Jay Som) transformed their house into a viable home studio, making it easy to fully realize the sound in her head, even at the height of a global lockdown. Taking things a step further, Melina agreed to co-produce the record, pushing Julia to make these new songs sound less like Perfect Version, her first solo album, or like the songs she performs in Chastity Belt. At the peak of her uncertainty and discomfort, she jumped into the deep end in search of something new—and found power in heavy sounds.
This is evident in the first few seconds of album opener “Death (XIII).” Taking newfound inspiration from the namesake Tarot card, drone metal, and shoegaze, Julia layers walls of guitars, bass chords, and programmed drums. “Come With Me,” the album’s lead single, takes inspiration from a mushroom trip gone bad. “Take me to awful places now,” she sings, envisioning heat death as her own eyes stare directly into the sun. On “Wrong Time,” shimmering guitars smolder and levitate, yet she finds herself “stuck inside this hole I’ve dug.” That said, these songs aren’t unbearably sad, nor has Julia become any less of a merciless observer of human behavior. By album closer “Hall of Mirrors,” she’s come full circle. Over fingerpicked guitar, the sense of lost identity becomes all-encompassing. It’s the sound of a life lived in servitude to digital screens and the psychic damage invisibly done along the way.
Though Julia Shapiro found herself in a near hermit-like existence, writing and recording almost all of the album’s instruments herself and struggling to navigate her place in a city and world rendered nearly comatose, she maintains a sense of humor about all of it. At the very least, “It’s funny to force people to have to say Zorked out loud. Any other title sounded pretentious.”
Released October 15, 2021.
Order the Zorked + Fake / Fear bundle HERE.
