Baltimore-based duo Ed Schrader’s Music Beat recently announced Nightclub Daydreaming, their first new album in four years. Following the album’s lead double-single “This Thirst” & “Berliner,” the band shares a new track “Echo Base.” Propelled by breakneck drum fills and a relentless bass line, the single is another dose of the band’s singular combination of icey cool and simmering aggression, whie the Devon Voelkel-directed video is a haunting fever dream that finds the duo of ​​Devlin Rice and Ed Schrader performing in a cobweb drenched cavern.

“A few years ago, I saw Carrie Fisher speak, and she referenced a Paul Simon song from Graceland where he compares her eyes to cold coffee. Her voice cracked as she spoke, and the whole theater went silent. This lyric from a decades-old song about a decades-old relationship still hurt her. This moment showed the brilliant, sharp-shooting woman of my childhood dreams as a real, vulnerable, wildly misunderstood and underappreciated human being. I wanted to make a song befitting a princess, our Carrie.” – Ed Schrader on “Echo Base”

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 their fourth record. Devlin Rice and Ed Schrader began writing the record in 2019, with the idea of making a fun, danceable album. 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.

“The fun thing about this record is that it’s all at once informed by our more recent lush productions with Dan Deacon, yet spartan and boiled-down, exuding a coldness wrapped in ecstasy, following our time honored trend of never giving people what they expect, but hopefully what they want,” says Schrader.

Photo Courtesy: Micah E Wood