CITIZEN RELEASE NEW ALBUM AS YOU PLEASE OUT NOW
“‘As You Please’ is the quintet at the height of their refinement.- HEAVY ★★★★
“The band has moved from a group of late-teenagers to young adults, with the writing chops and musicianship to match. Tracks like “Cement” carry a new texture and weight that’s a result of pushing their writing abilities to the limits.” – Noisey
“Folding in overcast guitar lines and largely taming their vocals to more breathy coos pushes them just a little closer to the downtrodden realms of more wiry shoegaze, not unlike similarly punk-rooted revivalists like Nothing and Title Fight.” – SPIN
Citizen release their new LP, As You Please out today via Run For Cover Records/Cooking Vinyl Australia.
BUY AS YOU PLEASE HERE
Citizen’s As You Please reports from ground zero of an epidemic. Two years removed from their previous Run For Cover LP, Everybody Is Going To Heaven, Citizen’s perspective is far less sublime. As You Please is a confrontational record, incapable of turning a blind eye toward the inescapable strife. And so, songwriter Mat Kerekes pursues the source of discontent that is ravaging his Rust Belt city of Toledo, Ohio with the band’s most dynamic record to date.
Watch the video for single In the Middle Of It All here:
On As You Please the epidemic is bigger than addiction and overdoses. There is no longer a Dream to be pursued for the friends and family surrounding Citizen. The band explores that absence and the misguided ways in which it gets filled. On opener Jet the kids move slow and there’s a stranger living in the narrator’s home. In The Middle Of It All might be Citizen at their most hopeful, but it also reads as agonizing expression of the ruin in the Heartland.
As You Please also showcases the growing versatility of a band seven years deep and still restless. Citizen has churned and ground out their own unique foothold within the greater context of alternative rock. Written over the course of a year, the record is devoid of the brutish and sinister elements found on Everybody Is Going To Heaven. Here, Citizen go beyond their early grunge contrasts and strive for something benevolent.
There’s a spiritual core to the record that manifests in subtle ways like the ethereal vocals echoing in the breakdown of Control, the droning organs on You Are A Star or the almost operatic refrain on In The Middle Of It All. The finespun ways in which Citizen has written this record mark a cataclysmic breakthrough for the band. There is damage and disarray in the band member’s lives, but within this record all the pieces have been restored in an ornate arrangement befitting a stained glass mosaic.
In the end, As You Please tries to give strength to those in need. There are illicit factors that control, but Citizen has written a guiding light of an album out of the debris. It concludes with You Are A Star andFlowerchild; one an unstable request of confidence set to soaring progressions, the other a blistering finale that subverts expectation. As You Please might read as meek, but it represents Citizen in its most confident and expansive state.
AS YOU PLEASE TRACK LISTING:
- Jet
02. In the Middle Of It All
03. As You Please
04. Medicine
05. Ugly Luck
06. World
07. Fever Days
08. Control
09. Discrete Routine
10. I Forgive No One
11. You Are a Star
12. Flowerchild