Ryan Hemsworth has announced Quarter-Life Crisis, a new project featuring collaborations with a slew of notable indie musicians, including Frances Quinlan (Hop Along), Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Charlie Martin (Hovvdy), Claud and Yohuna. Collaboration is paramount to Hemsworth’s process, and though he produced all of the live instrumentation on the album, he left the lyrics and intention of the song up to the contributors. The resulting collection shape-shifts from track-to-track, taking on new personalities as it moves between artists.

Hemsworth has shared “Postcard from Spain,” his collaboration with Frances Quinlan and lead single from Quarter-Life Crisis’ self-titled debut EP, available for pre-order now and due December 4th via Saddle Creek.
Of “Postcard from Spain,” Hemsworth said: “I had a plan going into the Quarter-Life Crisis project, but Frances really helped radicalize me, this collaboration was kind of the catalyst I unknowingly needed. Working on the arrangement together and with our engineer Ryan Schwabe was the best – I’ve worked with a lot of people but I felt a serious encouraging push from them. In the end we got this fun mix of live, electronic, soft and hard sounds (And a children’s choir on the chorus!). It feels like the basis of my whole project.”

“This was one of my first attempts at writing lyrics to a fully formed and recorded melody – it’s certainly one of the few times I’ve worked on something collaborating with an artist other than my bandmates in Hop Along,” said Frances Quinlan, front person of Hop Along, who released her debut solo album Likewise earlier this year. “I love the melodies Ryan Hemsworth composes, they’re both catchy and intriguing, calculated and dreamy. I was nervous about possibly throwing a wrench into it with my vocals, as I’m so used to writing lyrics along with the chords, but it ended up being a really freeing experience to focus solely on vocal melody, to play with where I could take what was already there, already strong on its own.”
LISTEN TO “POSTCARD FROM SPAIN“