Cry Club have returned with a shimmery new single titled ‘Hocus Pocus’, dropping it alongside the news of their forthcoming second album.
- READ MORE: Cry Club: “If you’re being as fully yourself as you can, no one can take that away from you”
In press materials, frontperson Heather Riley said of the track: “If this song was a person, I’d give it a big hug and lovingly tell it to suck it up and sort it’s shit out.”
They further explained: “Everyone has that one person they can’t help thinking about ‘what could have been’, and I especially have the worst habit of only realising how much I like someone when they have already moved on. Nobody will wait around for you forever, so it’s up to you to take responsibility for your emotions and move on.”
Riley went on to describe ‘Hocus Pocus’ as “the ‘ballad’ of the album” and “very much the ‘bad’ ending of Wolf Alice’s ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’”.
Like the rest of Cry Club’s upcoming album – titled ‘Spite Will Save Me’ and due out independently on June 23 – ‘Hocus Pocus’ was co-written with and produced by Alex Laska of Kingswood. On the way Laska’s involvement bolstered the track, Riley added: “Alex could see something in it that we hadn’t quite found yet, so he got me to record the vocals over and over and over again every day.
“Most of what you hear on the final product is actually what I thought was a warm-up take, it’s just simple, honest, and vulnerable.”
Have a look at the accompanying music video for ‘Hocus Pocus’, directed by Cry Club themselves, below:
‘Hocus Pocus’ comes as our fourth preview of ‘Spite Will Save Me’, following previous singles ‘People Like Me’, ‘Somehow (You Still Get To Me)’ and ‘I Want More’. The record follows up on 2020’s ‘God I’m Such A Mess’, with Riley and guitarist Jonathan Tooke recording with Laska over a week during Naarm/Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdowns.
On what to expect from the rest of the album, Riley said that while it’s “much heavier” than Cry Club’s earlier material, ‘Spite Will Save Me’ is “still true to who we are as a band”, with the overall mood being “more self-assured and unapologetically feral”. Thematically, they explained that “if our first album is about queer pride, this one is absolutely queer wrath”.
“Most importantly we love it,” Riley said, “and that’s the biggest takeaway for us.”
You can see the cover art and tracklisting for ‘Spite Will Save Me’ below, and find pre-orders for the record here.
1. ‘Get Up!!!’
2. ‘A Bit Of Hell’
3. ‘Somehow (You Still Get To Me)’
4. ‘Bad Taste’
5. ‘Hocus Pocus’
6. ‘Mirrored’
7. ‘People Like Me’
8. ‘Cry About It’
9. ‘Wildfire’
10. ‘I Want More’