Real Estate: The Main Thing 12″

Description

Over the last decade, Real Estate have crafted warm yet meticulous pop-minded music, specializing in soaring melodies that are sentimentally evocative and unmistakably their own. The Main Thing dives even further into the musical dichotomies they’re known for lilting, bright guitar lines set against emotionally nuanced lyrics, complex arrangements conveyed breezily and what emerges is a superlative collection of interrogative songs as full of depth, strangeness and contradictions as they are lifting hooks.

The Main Thing delivers the band’s most inspired and self-aware set of songs to date, created over the course of a year at upstate New York’s Marcata Sound. Following his work on 2011’s Days, engineer Kevin McMahon returns as producer, and, for the first time ever, Real Estate have brought in outside instrumentalists and special guests like Sylvan Esso, whose vocalist Amelia Meath features on first single, “Paper Cup.”

Across the 13 interrogative tracks as full of depth, strangeness, and contradictions as they are lifting hooks the band balances existential, environmental, and political anxieties with fatherly sentiments, self-satirizing lyrics, forever-lively guitar lines, and shimmering strings.