The Drums have announced their new album Jonny will drop on October 13th, 2023 via ANTI- Records. The full-length is a body of work confronts the deep-rooted childhood trauma Pierce experienced growing up in a cult-like religious community in upstate New York, and triumphs over the long shadow it cast on his life and relationships for years. Arriving with the news, The Drums have shared album track “Better” the latest song from the project, which combines the track’s hook over lyrics about lurching out of codependency and retreating back into reliable arms of loneliness. The Drums will bring songs from Jonny to life on stage for the first time ever on a full-length North American tour, which kicks off tonight in San Diego, CA and will run through the end of the summer.

“When I finished Jonny, I listened to it, and I heard my soul reflected back at me,” says Pierce about the record. “It is devastating and triumphant, it is lost and found, it is confused and certain, it is wise and foolish. It is male and female, it is hard and gentle. To encapsulate ones’ whole self in an album, to honor each and every part of you – even the parts that feel at odds with each other, is to make something deeply human, and because my religion is humanism, the album becomes a sacred place for me to worship. Each feeling a different pew, each song a hymn to the human heart.”

On Jonny, Pierce doesn’t just conquer the darkness that haunted his childhood and the subsequent unworthiness that loomed for decades after – he absolves and loves it for what it was. In doing so, the record unearths a true sense of hope, optimism and joy that’s existed just beyond his fingertips for most of his life. An embrace of the mess of life in all its facets, Jonny offers an invitation to dissolve all the hard lines that separate us from ourselves and, by extension, each other — to soften our shells, to let some tenderness in. Always finding the balance between aching melancholy and irresistible pop sensibilities, the album finds Pierce peering through a kaleidoscope of shimmering guitars, reverb, modular synthesizers and drum machines: a sonic identity that has been uniquely, and wholly The Drums since their emergence 15 years ago.

The album serves as a love letter to a galaxy of Pierce’s younger selves. The toddler who endured life-rippling trauma; the teenager who reflexively built up an armor to the outside world; the on-stage performer; the dancer; the lover. Each version of himself that, for much of his life, he felt was never enough. Channeled within tracks like “Better,” as well as the recently released “Obvious”, “I Want It All” and “Plastic Envelope / Protect Him Always,” the record is filled with self-reflective indie pop songs as well a series of minute-long vignettes that ground the album in gentle introspection as Pierce sings directly to his younger selves.

The album is a reclamation a lifetime in the making, even down to the intimate album and single artwork – a series of naked self-portraits snapped when he returned to his childhood home in New York a decade ago. Feeling a need to drive upstate one day while he knew his parents would be at service, he took a photo in prayer-pose in his father’s church office chair among other places in the house where something significant or traumatic happened to him as a kid. It was an experience he couldn’t make sense of in the moment, let alone share with the outside world, but the feeling of putting his nude body into the spaces where others had so often made him feel powerless was a triumph he would discover years later during the making of Jonny.

The Drums
Jonny
Tracklist
ANTI-

I Want It All
Isolette
I’m Still Scared
Better
Harms
Little Jonny
Plastic Envelope
Protect Him Always
Be Gentle
Dying
Green Grass
Obvious
The Flowers
Teach My Body
Pool God
I Used to Want To Die

THE DRUMS 2023 TOUR DATES

July 12, 2023 – San Diego, CA – House of Blues

July 14, 2023 – Los Angeles, CA – The Shrine

July 15, 2023 – Las Vegas, NV – Area 15

July 16, 2023 – Phoenix, AZ – Van Buren

July 17, 2023 – El Paso, TX – Lowbrow Palace

July 19, 2023 – Dallas, TX – Granada Theatre

July 20, 2023 – Austin, TX – Mohawk

July 21, 2023 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall

July 22, 2023 – New Orleans, LA – House of Blues

July 24, 2023 – Atlanta, GA – Terminal West

July 25, 2023 – Nashville, TN – Basement East

July 27, 2023 – Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle

July 28, 2023 – Washington, DC – 9:30 Club

July 29, 2023 – Philadelphia, PA – Theatre of Living Arts

July 31, 2023 – Boston, MA – Royale

August 3, 2023 – New York, NY – Webster Hall

August 5, 2023 – Detroit, MI – St. Andrew’s Hall

August 6, 2023 – Toronto, ON – Danforth Music Hall

August 8, 2023 – Chicago, IL – Metro

August 9, 2023 – Minneapolis, MN – Varsity

August 11, 2023 – Denver, CO – Bluebird

August 12, 2023 – Salt Lake City, UT – Psych Lake City at Urban Lounge

August 14, 2023 – Seattle, WA – The Showbox

August 15, 2023 – Vancouver, BC – Fortune Sound Club

August 16, 2023 – Portland, OR – Wonder Ballroom

August 18, 2023 – San Francisco, CA – The Regency Ballroom

Pre-order Jonny by The Drums HERE