Los Angeles band, Fol Chen, will release their third album, The False Alarms, on March 19 via Asthmatic Kitty Records. Fol Chen will tour North America this spring in support of the release.

Fol Chen makes the soundtrack to a future that never was. To listen is to leave the comfort of nostalgia and land with both feet in a bolder 21st century. The False Alarms continues the band’s electro-pop odyssey with a honed character and a distinct palette of sounds. Fol Chen has also traded its cloak of anonymity for defiant confidence featuring Sinosa Loa as its new front voice.

Since 2009, the Los Angeles-area collective has created their signature sound from field recordings and an electronic junk drawer, building compound beats and sending warped vocal transmissions. Led by producers Samuel Bing and Julian Wass, Fol Chen’s first two records, PART I: John Shade, Your Fortune’s Made (Asthmatic Kitty, 2009) and PART II: The New December (Asthmatic Kitty, 2010), cemented the band’s place as peddlers of dark pop in the alleys of independent music. Their live entity has a wide artistic reach with a propensity for interactive projects like the Tetrafol, a motion-based sound toy developed with musical interface pioneers Monome. Band events have been presented at sites such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Annenberg Space for Photography, and the Walker Art Center.

The False Alarms is electronic music with rich chords, progressive beats, and addictive melodies. The band calls their genre “Opera House,” a name lifted from Malcolm McLaren but recoined as beat-driven electronica with grand, operatic gestures and lyrically-dense storytelling. The songs, written by Bing and Sinosa, play together as a surreal journey with a human core, created in a year marked by sudden losses of family and friends. Fol Chen builds music with honesty and obsessive precision, and the results are songs that move and are moving. On the dance floor or in the bedroom, The False Alarms is a set of pop symphonies that are chopped, screwed, mangled and beautiful.

Asthmatic Kitty presents The False Alarms: songs of uncertainty, identity, part-time love, loss and mistaken reality. It’s pop music for people who aren’t sure where or when they are, but who know it’s nowhere they’ve been before.

THE FALSE ALARMS TRACK LIST

01. The False Alarms

02. I.O.U.

03. A Tourist Town

04. Hemispheres

05. The Fifth Season

06. Boys in the Woods

07. 200 Words

08. You Took the Train

09. Doubles

10. This Place is on TV

TOUR DATES
Mar 08 San Diego, CA – Casbah

Mar 09 Phoenix, AZ – The Crescent Ballroom

Mar 17 Hot Springs, AZ – Low Key Arts

Mar 19 Chicago, IL – Schubas

Mar 20 Des Moines, IA – Vaudeville Mews

Mar 22 Denver, CO – Hi Dive

Mar 24 Seattle, WA – Barboza

Mar 26 Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios

Mar 28 San Francisco, CA – Bottom of The Hill

Mar 29 Los Angeles, CA – Bootleg

Apr 02 Washington DC, Black Cat

Apr 03 Philadelphia, PA – Kung Fu Necktie

Apr 04 Brooklyn, NY – Glasslands

Apr 06 Montreal, QC – Casa Del Popolo

Apr 07 Toronto, ON – The Drake Hotel