This July comes St. Catherine, Matt Mondanile’s fifth outing as Ducktails. The new album emerges from the roots of Mondanile’s previous work, from the free-form, ambient bedroom experiments of seminal underground release Landscapes (2009), to 2013’s eighties pop re-imagination The Flower Lane, the forthcoming album sees Ducktails on to a more refined, personal and sincere place. Today, Ducktails shares the first single “Headbanging In The Mirror,” which you can listen to below.

St. Catherine is a collection of baroque pop songs that take the blissful, cascading melodic fretwork that Mondanile has made his signature with both Ducktails and his other band, Real Estate, and applies it to songs of considerable new emotional level.

Mondanile partially wrote and recorded St. Catherine over the course of 2014 and then finished off recording at the start of 2015. The longest time he has ever spent working on a record, it took place in bedrooms and studios predominantly in east LA and Glendale, but venturing as far as Berlin and New York as Mondanile worked on tracks around heavy periods of Real Estate touring.

When Mondanile finally settled back in LA at the start of 2015, it was Rob Schnapf, co-producer of Elliott Smith’s classic albums XO and Either/Or, that he turned to in order to help put the finishing touches to St. Catherine. Together, the pair added a new crispness and punch to the record’s more upbeat, psychedelic pop tracks (such as James Ferraro-featuring, lolloping lead single “Headbanging In The Mirror”, and the soaring “Into The Sky”), that recalls the artful muscularity of Smith’s later work, whilst title track, the heavenly “St. Catherine” boasts one of Mondanile’s greatest ever lead guitar lines and benefits greatly from Schnapf’s warm, rich feel. St. Catherine will be available on July 24th on CD, digitally, standard edition LP, and on limited edition coloured vinyl LP through Domino Records.

Tracklist:

1. The Disney Afternoon
2. Headbanging In The Mirror
3. Into The Sky
4. Heaven’s Room
5. St. Catherine
6. The Laughing Woman
7. Surreal Exposure
8. Church
9. Medieval
10. Krumme Lanke

TOUR DATES

May 26: Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands
May 27: La Maroquinerie, Paris, France
May 28: Ekko, Utrecht, Netherlands
May 29: Marie Antoinette, Berlin, Germany
May 30: Immergut Festival, Neustreiltz, Germany
May 31: Radar, Aarhus, Denmark
June 1: Pustervik, Goteborg, Sweden
June 2: Bla, Oslo, Netherlands
June 3: Lilla Hotellbaren, Stockholm, Sweden
June 4: Mejeriet, Lund, Sweden
June 5: Kleiner Donner, Hamburg, Germany
June 6: DOK, Gent, Belgium
June 7: Field Day, London, UK
June 8: Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, UK
July 24: Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
July 31: Boot & Saddle, Philadelphia, PA
August 1: Euclid Tavern, Cleveland, OH
August 2: The Bishop, Bloomington, IN
August 3: Schuba’s, Chicago, IL
August 4: The Loving Touch, Ferndale, MI
August 5: Garrison, Toronto, ON
August 6: Casa Del Popolo, Montreal, QC
August 7: Bowery Ballroom, New York, NY
August 9: Great Scott, Boston, MA