Parquet Courts return with their brand of indie rock designed for the dance-floor!
Sympathy for Life is the seventh studio album by the American rock band Parquet Courts. The album was released on October 22, 2021, on Rough Trade Records.
Produced by Rodaidh McDonald and John Parish, the album was preceded by the singles, "Plant Life", "Walking at a Downtown Pace", "Black Widow Spider" and "Homo Sapien".
The vast majority of the album was written and recorded before the COVID-19 pandemic, with the band working on long, improvised compositions before arranging them into songs influenced by clubbing and nightlife.
During the recording process, the band actively sought to evolve their sound, with co-lead vocalist and guitarist Austin Brown noting: "Being a band for so long, there's lots of bands that can write a Parquet Courts song, and I’ve heard some that were not written by us. That stresses to me how important it is to evolve and move past what might be popularly considered a Parquet Courts sound."
The band was influenced by the Primal Scream album, Screamadelica (1991), which fused indie rock with house music, and wanted to recreate the feeling of clubbing culture and nightlife in the studio: "We very much wanted to make a record that embodied a live music experience but more like at a club or party level with DJs, not necessarily a live band. As a live band, we wanted to capture DJ music." Co-lead vocalist and guitarist Andrew Savage, in particular, was inspired by the bands, Can, Canned Heat and This Heat.
