LOS ANGELES ROCK TRIO THE RECORD COMPANY
SET TO RELEASE ALL OF THIS LIFE ON JUNE 22
Follow-up to Grammy-Nominated Debut Showcases
New Songwriting Depth and Studio Sophistication
The Record Company will release All Of This Life, the hotly anticipated follow-up to their 2016 GRAMMY-nominated debut, on June 22, 2018 via Concord Records. One listen to the band’s exhilarating new music and it’s clear just how much the trio has grown as a result of their meteoric rise. The gritty slide guitar, fuzzed-out bass, and driving drums are still front and center, but the songs are bolder and more ambitious this time around, deeper and more reflective, brimming with adventurous vitality while remaining firmly tethered to the roots of American rock and roll that have always grounded and nourished the group.
“After that first album, everything just got amplified,” says singer/guitarist Chris Vos. “Our lives got crazier and bigger and more complicated in the best possible ways, and our sound and our songwriting just naturally grew alongside that. We’re the same people we always were, but The Record Company isn’t just three guys in a living room anymore.”
By now, The Record Company’s story is a well-known one: a trio of musicians grit it out on their own for years in bars and clubs, join forces in LA, set up some microphones in a living room, and cut an album that turns their world upside down. Give It Back To You spawned three Top Ten hits at Triple-A radio (including the #1 smash “Off The Ground”), earned the band a slew of festival appearances and sold-out headline dates around the world, and garnered a GRAMMY nomination. The group made the rounds on late night TV, shared bills with John Mayer, Zac Brown Band, My Morning Jacket and Nathaniel Rateliff among others, and racked up more than ten million streams on Spotify. The critical response was just as ecstatic, with Rolling Stone raving that the band “kick[s] up a raw, rootsy racket” and Entertainment Weekly calling the album a “soul scorcher.”
While the band—Vos, bassist Alex Stiff, and drummer Marc Cazorla—still worked up most songs at home and produced themselves once again, they headed to nearby Boulevard Recording in Hollywood on a quest to break new ground. The eclectic array of analog gear in the studio, which had hosted everyone from Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac to The War on Drugs, enabled the band to push the limits of their productions and arrangements while still capturing all the scintillating power and spontaneity of their live show. The resulting songs reflect our troubled times, but they focus inwards rather than outwards, musing on personal empowerment, self-improvement, and the supremacy of love. Album opener “Life To Fix” is a driving ode to forward motion and getting through hard times by continually putting one foot in front of the other, while the utterly infectious “Make It Happen” finds Vos proclaiming, “If you want something / You got to go out and get it.”
“This record to me is about self-reflection and making yourself better,” he explains. “It’s about taking responsibility for your own spot in the world. If you’re not on the right path, the only person who can take that next step to fix it is you, and at the end of the day, after all the highs and lows, all you’re left with is yourself.”
“We learned from the first album that our audience really connected to songs with a little more inner depth and reflection,” adds Stiff. “Sometimes people would find deeper meaning in the music than we ever thought possible. Folks would come up after shows and tell us that our songs got them through a divorce or a grieving process, which was really powerful and inspiring.”
In addition to digging deep lyrically, the band pushed themselves beyond their traditional musical boundaries on the album. “Goodbye To The Hard Life” is a slow-burning 6/8 ballad that calls to mind the simmering potency of Led Zeppelin, while the acoustic twang of “I’m Changing” taps into the rural southern intensity of Johnny Cash, and the rollicking “I’m Getting Better” captures the essence of Bob Dylan’s rambunctious Highway 61 Revisited period as if played by some punk rock kids stepping into the garage for the first time.
The Record Company will hit the road extensively in support of All Of This Life; see below for a list of tour dates.