The Silent Comedy have released “Enemies Multiply” the title track from the forthcoming album due out 10/19.
The songs on the album are inspired by professional and personal struggles the band found themselves in several years ago. The turmoil had a profound influence on the recording process, resulting in a body of work that was the most difficult to date for the band to create. But, like most great works of art, something really beautiful emerged from that very dark place. Enemies Multiply is a collection of 11 songs that the band is very proud of. The timing couldn’t be better, with our current cultural climate, to release this album in 2018. “This album is a collection of anthems for dark times,” says Joshua Zimmerman. “Given the state of society today, we feel this is a perfect time to release Enemies Multiply. The average person has become more engaged in issues of exploitation and injustice than we have seen in recent years, and these songs speak directly to the feelings of anger, defiance, and frustration that many of us are feeling."
The release of the album was delayed for a number of reasons, with the main reason being that reliving the pain and frustration put into the songs was like rubbing salt into their wounds, and the brothers (Joshua and Jeremiah Zimmerman) chose, for a time, to focus their creative energies elsewhere. But then the 2016 election happened. Joshua was living in New York City and was feeling bewildered and frustrated at the country’s new reality. He realized that the feeling of this moment is what they wrote the record for. A certain pall of outrage and desperation had settled over the country and in Joshua’s estimation, the album now had greater cultural resonance.
The title track and current single, “Enemies Multiply,” is an examination of destructive personality types and how they affect the world around us. It embraces the view that mere participation in our society leaves an individual open to a certain amount of exploitation and betrayal. With lyrics like, “Won’t allow my heart to break for every beautiful mistake,” it also stands as a defiant anthem in the face of a bleak reality.
Joshua and Jeremiah Zimmerman formed the Silent Comedy in their adopted hometown of San Diego. The brothers spent their childhood traveling around the world with their missionary parents. The family returned to the U.S. and meandered a bit on the road before settling in San Diego, where they moved into a house with nothing in it but an upright piano. It was then - around junior high - that the brothers started collaborating on songwriting as a form of catharsis. It is their travels that have colored their worldview, which when compared to some of their peers, is decidedly darker. Seeing the immense amount of suffering around the world really shaped how they look at life, and Enemies Multiply is a distillation of this somber perspective.
This will be the band’s third full-length record and the follow up to their last full length, Common Faults, which has gone through three rounds of CD re-pressings due to demand and has garnered tens of millions of streams and downloads. Their music has also been paired with gritty American tales such as Hatfields & McCoys, starring Kevin Costner, the History Channel’s original series The Men Who Built America, Showtime’s Shameless, and the theme song for the first season of the Amazon show Goliath. The success of the album led to tours of North America, Europe, and the UK, and supporting slots with artists such as The Heavy, ZZ Ward, Ryan Bingham, and Dave Matthews Band to name a few.
The band has two release shows planned for Enemies Multiply. The first in Los Angeles at the Hi Hat on 10/18 and the second in San Diego at the Casbah on 10/19, which is already sold out.
