Australian singer/songwriter Michael Beach releases his moving new single, “You Found Me Out”. Beach reveals, “The lyrics are nebulous thoughts on the constant barrage of information and putting forth of opinion we’re surrounded by. There’s a definite feeling of at-sea-ness and an awareness of the gravity and destruction of love while in such an unmoored state.”

Michael Beach is an architect of a sound that’s both well-built and ramshackle, straightforward and indeterminably complex, out of the norm yet familiar in all the best ways. His forthcoming album Dream Violence explores the duality of the human condition. It encapsulates human futility, passion, desire, anger, frustration, and the struggle to maintain hope in a somewhat hopeless time. “My hope is that something gets communicated that makes people think outside of themselves or their surroundings,” he says. “To ask questions, and consider the effects of their decisions. To communicate some essential part of the human spirit that understands intuitively how to feel connected to each other rather than divide, exploit, separate, ignore, and all the other heinous things we have the ability to do with each other.”

Recorded on two continents, Dream Violence documents Beach’s move from Oakland, California to Melbourne, Australia as he navigated a new music scene, plenty of bureaucratic red tape, and, ultimately, citizenship. Parts of the album were recorded and mixed at Tiny Telephone Recording in Oakland, at the end of a 2019 tour with Kelley Stoltz producing. Other tracks were recorded at Beach’s new home in Melbourne, where he worked with Matthew Ford and Innez Tulloch of Thigh Master, with Peter Warden on drums, to capture an off-the-cuff feel. 

Dream Violence unfolds like a revelation, filled with sonic tumbleweeds that reference Neil Young’s On the Beach, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, and the Go Betweens’ Before Hollywood. Influences ranging from the enigmatic outlier Megira to Glenn Branca to the Oblivians are combined to create a new, exhilarating sound, part of the path that Beach has been on since 2008’s Blood Courses. A veteran of year-end indie rock round ups beginning with Golden Theft in 2013 and continuing with Gravity/Repulsion, released in 2017, Beach distills the best of those early albums and adds sharpened intent. Dream Violence will be released via Goner Records on March 19 in North America and on Poison City Records in Australia and New Zealand. Pre-order it here.