“After the release of 2018’s Wide Awake, Parquet Courts guitarist Austin Brown was feeling the effects of nearly a decade of touring and recording. “To be frank, I was a bit disillusioned with music in general. There was this exhaustion. Maybe I was just a bit bored with the state of rock music or indie music – it was a hard world to relate to, and I’m not sure we ever did. But I wanted to figure out a way to reject ideas of whatever was being pushed as culture, and I wanted to do it in a productive way by offering up something better.” That something is Sympathy For Life, his Brooklyn outfit’s 7th full length. In an effort to branch out both musically and socially, Brown became a member of The Loft, New York’s longest running and most influential underground dance party, ground zero for disco in the 1970s. While there is still plenty of rock to be found here, it is often braided together with elements of dance music, in the spirit of Talking Heads, Happy Mondays and Primal Scream. The emphasis was on rhythm, the goal to write songs a DJ could easily unfurl at a party. And to get there they largely switched up their lyrics first approach to writing, recording and editing together long stretches of improvisation. “We’ve been together for ten years now”, Brown says. “One of the biggest influences on the sound of the record is us utilizing that. Our biggest asset and our best instrument is just us playing together as a band.” – Apple Music
“With sincere, resolute songwriting and a more accessible sound, the latest album from the New York quartet feels more suited than ever for the ecstasy of a crowded club.” – Pitchfork
“Sympathy for Life still skyrockets as a natural follow-up to the left turn of its tonally ambitious and technically masterful predecessor—but on this project, the band ramp up their polished sound with an assembly of synth-rock and soft palettes of speculative and, sometimes, refreshingly vulnerable lyricism.” – Paste Magazine
“It’s not a complete reinvention of the Parquet Courts sound. Still, it sounds just refined enough, just imbued with enough intriguing and unexpected influences, that it ends Sympathy for Life on a resounding high.” – Pop Matters