Nashville rock duo The Criticals (Parker Forbes and Cole Shugart), have signed to Fantasy Records and today they announce their debut EP for the label titled Front Door Confrontations out July 21st. To mark the occasion they’ve shared the first single, “Clever Girl,” and its companion music video directed by Hannah Hall. The video has the band musing on 9-5 office life of a bygone era.

The Criticals on the single: “We really wanted an upbeat, straight forward song to finish out this EP- one to tie all the others together. ‘Clever Girl’ started after having a dance party of all the new tunes we were really digging. Lyrically I felt like I had been writing the same stuff over and over again recently, so I just decided to go off of a personal encounter I had eves-dropping on a couple at a bar a few nights before we started writing the song.  We started ‘Clever Girl’ with a desire for a robotic dance song, after a lull of only writing ballads and mid tempo grooves. We were listening to The Bravery a lot at that time, so the repetitive downstroke nature of the guitars happened organically. Some songs just arrive and it’s difficult to remember which path you took to get there, and that’s what ‘Clever Girl’ was. It more or less fell out of us one afternoon.”

Friends for more than a decade, having first met as children at music camp – Forbes and Shugart logged time together in Nashville’s wild DIY rock scene. The two musicians quite simply feed off one another’s energy and not only has it made for a close friendship, but an incomparable musical partnership that blends tuneful classicism and indie-rock thrash into a seductive, unforgettable mix. Now, following a pair of highly-regarded EPs — 2019’s Mimosa Hygiene and the following year’s Sour Grapes — not to mention a steady diet of raucous live shows, the band is set to release their most accomplished work yet with Front Door Confrontations.

Photo Courtesy: Hannah Hall