Baltimore-based duo Ed Schrader’s Music Beat will release its new album Nightclub Daydreaming later this month, and today the band shares the record’s final single, “European Moons.”

In addition to the single release, and before the band starts its tour tonight, Ed is issuing the personal statement below: “In the past few weeks, I’ve made a big decision. I’ve decided to give you the full me. I’ve decided to speak openly about something that I had never spoken to anyone about. The me that I’ve been repressing in hopes of not making other people feel uncomfortable. But that’s not a life—that’s an inhumane purgatory that I am done subjecting myself to.  

That said, I have always felt like a woman and my pronouns are they/them. 

The stage and the studio have always been a safe space for me, where I can share my deepest struggles, joys and laughs. In your art, you can’t lie. That’s why I have always chosen riddles and cryptic lyrics in my art. I could never lie, but I could disguise the truth.

With ‘Nightclub Daydreaming’ I continued this precedent, essentially telling my autobiography through fictional characters and surreal landscapes. But these are the stories of my fear, my neuroses, my ecstasy and my journey.

The first single off of the record, “This Thirst,” is about the thirst for my true self, and features the first time I ever referred to myself as a woman: “Who will rock you to the fire / Who’s the priestess to ordain?” 

On “Black Pearl,” I sing of two lovers disconnected by an ocean, representing the personal dichotamy between my true self and who I was presenting to the world. In retrospect, you can hear the yearning as I sing “I want to see you really…a foreigner, even home now / I shut in vaults to heal you.” I was the foreigner whom no one had ever met, besides my bathroom mirror. When home alone, I would wear women’s clothing, put on makeup, blast M.I.A. and Yelle, and somehow this felt like a crime that no one would ever accept.

You can hear both my euphoria and trepidation on songs like “Berliner.” Deep down, I was beginning to feel my real self emerging in an undeniable way, and I was horrified by it. It felt as if others held the key to my own self worth through their acceptance, or lack thereof. 

On “European Moons,” which we release today, I depict myself as a marionette, at the whims of a puppet master forcing me to present a distorted and untrue version of myself. “my posture’s at your strings / too much of coded sighs / I’d like to see you in the night.” It was my true self that I could only see at night. 

I have always felt like a woman and, moving forward, I will begin following that path one day at a time. Only the future knows where exactly that path will lead me, but I’m doing it my way. I will no longer only see my true self at night.”

Ed Shrader’s Music Beat turned heads with the densely orchestrated, Dan Deacon-produced album Riddles in 2018, and now, four years later, they return with the band’s fourth record. Devlin Rice (he/him/his) and Ed Schrader (they/them/theirs) began writing the record in 2019, with the idea of making a fun, danceable album, but an underlying moodiness proved unshakeable. As Schrader puts it, “The cave followed us into the discotheque.” They road-tested the songs with drummer Kevin O’Meara on tour with Dan Deacon in February 2020, and then, of course, COVID brought everything to a halt. It was one of the last experiences they had with O’Meara, whose death in October 2020 weighed heavily on Rice and Schrader’s minds as they worked on the record. The band went on to record and mix Nightclub Daydreaming over a two-week period with Craig Bowen at Tempo House in Baltimore, and the end result is not the album of “sunny disco bangers” that Rice says the band set out for, but something deeper, darker and more rewarding.

Photo Courtesy: Micah E Wood