Premiere: Blanky’s ‘Run Baby’ is country shoegaze perfection

Blanky. // photo courtesy the artist

In December, Manor Records releases Blood Harmony, the latest full-length from Lawrence “alt-country, grungy shoegaze band” Blanky. The first single from that album, “Run Baby,” premieres today via The Pitch, and we’re excited to share it below.

Sounding like a blissed-out My Bloody Valentine cover of a lost Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood duet, it is definitely the Venn diagram where every single part of Blanky’s descriptors meet and become something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

While you listen to the song below, you can read through our chat with the band’s frontman Anthony Cunard about the song and the making of Blood Harmony.

The Pitch: Between the last recording and this recording, Blanky has changed lineups a bit. Is that just the nature of the project at this point?

Anthony Cunard: It wasn’t the intended nature of it, but it does seem to be kind of an evolving cast of characters, and I have been the primary songwriter at the center of it, but I would like to–at some point–settle on a consistent band. Life happens and people’s priorities change, so it’s been difficult.

Listening to “Run Baby” and it does have that analog warmth to it. Was that the reason you went with reel-to-reel to record all of this?

Was a big part of it. It took me a long time to realize, growing up, that a lot of my favorite recordings sounded the way they did not necessarily just because they were recorded on a tape machine, but just the process of recording on tape sort of forces you maybe to record differently than in a digital process. There’s some aspect of the live performance on all of the recordings. At least two people lay down the foundational tracks live, and everything else is either overdubbed or–for some of the tracks, things were recorded close to how we perform them live.

Also, one has to imagine that it makes you more thoughtful about your recording process because tape’s a finite resource. Like, it costs money.

Yeah, that is true, as well. We’ve reused a lot of our tapes, which is kind of weird–most people archive them forever. Still, once we’ve converted them to cassette and also bounced them to some sort of digital format, tapes aren’t always necessarily easy to come across, and I don’t have a technician to work on my reel-to-reel. I’ve bought tapes before and depending on the manufacturer, some of them are not aligned properly with the tape heads that run along the tape and track to it. Unfortunately, some brands of tape don’t even work correctly with my reel-to-reel, so that makes it even more difficult.

We’ve read about bands reusing tape and finding out that does some stuff in and of itself because it’s not a clean recording. There’s still some ghost of what came before.

That’s true. And I’ve personally kind of liked some of that. If you listen to the cassette version of the album, in between tracks, you’ll hear very subtle–it’s hard to distinguish what you’re hearing, but I know that it’s old recordings that had once existed on the tape, and there’s still some subtle skeleton of them there.

Nothing you do is ever really truly gone.

Yeah, it sneaks back into the new recordings, which oftentimes has a pretty cool effect. And it just kinda happens accidentally.

Blood harmony is one of those things that, hearing it in music– like the Everly Brothers or the Louvin Brothers–it’s something undefinable. What led you to choose that title for your upcoming album?

It was inspired by the Louvin Brothers. I always thought the idea of blood harmony is awesome–just an intuitive connection with somebody where you have an unspoken understanding of how to collaborate with them.

There’s not actually many literal harmonies taking place on the record, but I liked the idea as a concept related to like relationships–finding a relationship with people that was almost that intuitive and harmonious; a relationship you didn’t have to put much work into figuring out who did what role and you just understood one another.

You can pre-order Blanky’s Blood Harmony on Bandcamp.