In the five years since Fake Problems last put out a full-length, vocalist Chris Farren has been pretty damn busy. Between his solo material, his work with Jeff Rosenstock in Antarctico Vespucci, his Christmas album, and his cool T-shirt biz, the South Florida band that Farren played in with bassist Derek Perry (who has released music with his own project, Great Neck) and drummer Sean Stevenson has slowed down over the past few years: their last release was a 2013 split seven-inch alongside You Blew It! with the objectively wrong title of Florida Doesn’t Suck.
The inactivity isn’t due to lack of effort, though. The band went into the studio with Grammy Award-winning producer Ted Hutt (The Gaslight Anthem, Flogging Molly) in 2013 and 2014, but the finished product didn’t sit right with the band. “While we recorded some songs that we really loved, it didn’t feel like a complete and cohesive record,” said Stevenson. “Without knowing what to do with the whole thing we kind of sat on it while everyone worked on other projects.”
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Now, the band has decided to release some of the songs through a seven-inch series called Strange Emotions, the first of which is “Holy Attitude.” Farren said the title track, was originally intended for a compilation of songs inspired by Jack Kerouac’s Tritessa. “I sent it to the people who asked and they said it wasn’t specific enough,” Farren recalled. “An example of a note they gave was, ‘Can you change the line about playing the guitar to something about playing the bongos? Jack played the bongos, not guitar.’ I politely declined and we decided to use it for this instead.”
You can listen to “Holy Attitude” and “Can You Live With That?”—which Farren described as originally having a New Order vibe before Hutt helped them change it into a “60s surf rock song”—below and pre-order the record here.
