Archers of Loaf’s new album, Reason in Decline, will drop on October 21, via Merge Records. It marks the band’s first full-length studio album in over two decades. Throughout the LP, the band reshapes its powerful twin-guitar tumult into expansive backdrops that sparkle and cast shadows around Bachmann’s haunting ballads. Today they release “Aimee,” a dusty, fingerpicked ode that echoes plaintively in a light-streaked cave of plinks, flutters, and moaning guitar twang. Bachmann explains: “Right in the middle of an album about war profiteering, suicide ideation, modern propaganda and the struggle against anti-intellectualism comes this brief exhalation in the form of a tender, albeit dystopian, love song.”

“For Archers lyrics, songs, everything, I had to imagine I was this angry white curmudgeon college guy who hates capitalism and consumerism and has a broken heart,” he says. “He’s bitter about relationships, so he makes fun of things to seem cool. As I’ve aged, I’m far less like that anymore, but it is a part of my personality. I just wasn’t excited about re-energizing it. I used that guy as a starting point to get myself out of the gate, but in the course of writing the actual songs, he eventually went away.”

Unable to perform, tour, or earn, Bachmann had become the full-time stay-at-home parent of a toddler son, while his wife toiled as an ICU nurse. The change was profound. “I’m 51, I’ve been [writing and playing music] since I was 14,” he says. “I’ve been doing it for a living since I was 22, that’s 37 years. For the first time, when COVID happened, I couldn’t do it. It was a massive psychological setback, to the point that I had to get help. I already had a problem with suicide ideation, constantly thinking about this shit. And I’m not ashamed to say that. Thousands and thousands of people have the same problem. Anyway, all this got baked into the songs.”

Guitarists Eric Bachmann and Eric Johnson, once headstrong smartasses inciting a series of artful pileups on the band’s four studio albums and EP, are now a fluidly complementary, sonically advanced unit. Notably, Johnson’s signature trebly lines peal clearly above the din instead of struggling to be heard. Today, singer-songwriter Bachmann’s lyrics balance righteous wrath with a complex tangle of adult perspective. He still spits bile, but it’s less likely to concern scene politics, music trends, or shady record labels thwarting the dreams of a young rock band. Bachmann puts it bluntly: “What I really think about going back to the Archers and doing a new record is that the three other members of this band are awesome. It’s not about responding to the past or whatever our bullshit legacy is. I just wanted to work with these guys because I knew the chemistry we had and that we still have. I knew that was rare.”

Archers of Loaf 2022 tour dates

Nov 29 – Ottobar – Baltimore, MD
Nov 30 – Underground Arts – Philadelphia, PA
Dec 1 – The Sinclair – Boston, MA
Dec 2 – Warsaw – Brooklyn, NY
Dec 3 – The Broadberry – Richmond, VA
Dec 4 – Grey Eagle – Asheville, NC
Jan 10 – Thunderbird Music Hall – Pittsburgh, PA
Jan 11 – Lee’s Palace – Toronto, ON
Jan 12 – El Club – Detroit, MI
Jan 13 – The Bottom Lounge – Chicago, IL
Jan 14 – Delmar Hall – St. Louis, MO
Jan 15 – Basement East – Nashville, TN
Feb 7 – Teragram Ballroom – Los Angeles, CA
Feb 8 – Great American Music Hall – San Francisco, CA
Feb 10 – Mississippi Studios – Portland, OR
Feb 11 – Mississippi Studios – Portland, OR
Feb 12 – Neumos – Seattle, WA

Pre-order Reason In Decline By Archers Of Loaf HERE