Today we bring you the premiere and the first listen of the latest track from Atlanta based garage punk /grunge outfit, Small. “Coyote” will officially be released tomorrow, September 2nd, and is from the band’s upcoming LP, Decathexis, which is set to be released later this month on September 30th, via Triphouse.
“Coyote” which also happens to be the opener for the album, is a a desperate, breakneck grunge-punk blast song that is from a confessional/autobiographical account about the numbness that one feels when being lost in a relationship that is toxic, and dealing with a partner who is indifferent. Samm Severin vents those frustration with raw emotion in her delivery of each line.
A lot of the inspiration for a number of the tracks in general on the upcoming album comes directly from giving your all to someone else, perhaps a fault. Or as Samm explains.
Most of the songs on the new record, come from me having invested so much of myself into another person. Not that it’s a bad thing to do, but the way I experienced it, I left feeling like all my growth over the past several years had been in the context of the relationship.
For a time, I mainly identified as this person’s partner, and with that gone, it was like there was nothing of me left. I kept wondering, ‘Am I real? Do I exist? Who am I really? And how loud do I have to be before I can hear that?’ So I’d whisper these little truths to myself and crank up the volume—make them as loud as I could, and as real as possible based on my experiences and my understanding of the art I’ve spent my entire life consuming.
I figured, ‘If it’s loud enough, it’s probably fucking real.’ A lot of what I wrote is what I needed to hear at the time. Deacathexis is me rediscovering myself.”
More From Small
From the breakneck grunge-punk blast of album-opener “Coyote” straight through the nightmare heartbreak loop of final track “Better,” SMALL’s Decathexis is a gravel- and dirt-caked open wound of a record—grotesque, oozing, dusted with broken glass and shattered bone fragments, yet beautiful in its raw, unflinching emotional honesty. Clawing her way out through the pounding drums and torrential guitar squall, singer-guitarist Samm Severin wails catharsis like a banshee with smoldering heart-eyes. Shrouded in a spectral, ripped-to-shreds vintage party dress, she lays herself bare in such vulnerable, unapologetic terms as to crash through the defenses of even the most cynical listener.
“Everything with SMALL is an aggrandizement of the feminine,” Severin explains. “The masculine is usually credited with being more proactive, aggressive, violent; but this is also inherent in the feminine experience. Naming the band SMALL—all caps—alludes to the nature of the feminine to shrink to make space for the masculine in a gender binary. The name also reflects the way our inner feminine self shrinks to make room for our inner masculine self. It’s the idea of this large, violent feminine that’s in turmoil and experiences pain in a very deep, connected–to-the-Earth sort of way, and how the fury that lies within that has been softened and flattened to flowers and bows.”
Decathexis—also featuring SMALL co-founder Olive Lynch on bass, drummer Jake Cook and guitarist Stephen Wilkins—was born of the flaming wreckage of one of those monumental breakups that makes you question your entire identity; a 9-point earthquake-caliber cleaving that marks a chasm in your personal history and leaves you forever changed. Severin—who, along with bandmate Lynch spent years working as a standup comic prior the formation of SMALL—suddenly found herself in a place where her time-tested coping mechanism came up empty.