It’s said that the sound we’ll be hearing on Open Head’s forthcoming album, What Is Success, was born from argument and frustration with the band feeling like prisoners inside their previous post-punk blueprint. Breaking free from it is an escape that was worth making on the album’s latest preview, “N.Y. Frills”, a listen that acts as a double entendre of sorts between its city-surrounding influences, both sonically through its noise and no wave scenes where their continuation of the timeline set by Suicide, Sonic Youth, and Blonde Redhead veers into dance-laden platforms, and geographically where those platforms are grotesque high rise penthouses lived in by its extravagantly detached class of life. The latter feeds the former with horror of the gluttony, as guitarist Brandon Minnervini — whose own experiences in his day job delivering designer shelving to such places — lowers his way down each layer of luxury, increasingly worn out by the views. Metaphorically, the listen is the hardened working class hands of Atlas holding up the privileged world. On that thought, the whole city is its own form of an articulated designed prison for those on the ground level…

Open Head’s What Is Success will be released January 24th on Wharf Cat Records.