The Band: DESPERATE JOURNALIST

The Release: ‘EVERYTHING YOU WANTED'

The Format: DIGITAL SINGLE

The Release Date: JUNE 18TH 2021

The Listening Link: Listen Now On Your Platform Of Choice Here

The Album Pre-Order Link: Pre-Order 'Maximum Sorrow' Album On All Formats Here The Truth: Shadowy neogothpopcats DESPERATE JOURNALIST release a brand new single called 'Everything You Wanted' on June 18th. The noirishly fragrant foursome, still very much consisting of singer Jo Bevan, guitarist Rob Hardy, drummer Caz Hellbent and bassist Simon Drowner, deliver a rapidfire follow-up to the Good Friday release of 'Fault' and the springtime pop whirl of 'Personality Girlfriend'.

'Everything You Wanted' is the third tease from behind the curt curtains which guides us towards the summertime release of their forthright fourth album, 'Maximum Sorrow!'. If 'Fault' thundered in the mountains, all bruised of lyric and brutalist of sound, and 'Personality Girlfriend' found the band at their most jovial and musically joyful, relatively speaking, then 'Everything You Wanted' is meta-Desp J, all haunted guitars, languidly muscular grooves and don't-look-at-me vocals building to a crackingly massive / massively cracking chorus. Clouds, silver linings, glowering power chords and more clouds, all wrapped up in six luxurious minutes and 19 seconds.

"'Everything You Wanted' started off being about the artist Kevin Bewersdorf. I often wonder if he's OK.," muses singer Jo. "He was the creator of the original Maximum Sorrow! art project, who had a large online catalogue of his internet art for years throughout the 2000s which gradually became more and more spiritual and abstract; the last series of works he created were these really intricate and quite beautiful animated gif mandalas to use while meditating. He then deleted everything on his site and replaced it with a blank page coloured a deep pure blue with nothing but a tiny animated gif of a flame constantly flickering at the bottom - was it a nervous breakdown or an artistic breakthrough? The two often go hand in hand don't they.

"The song mentions some of his work and ideas, as well as the Nine Eyes of Google Streetview, another sort of Modern Romanticist piece of internet art. All of these artworks have this sense of transfiguring the online mundane - the world of commerce, watermarked stock images, Google Maps, etc - into something almost cosmically affecting and mysterious. I think they are so successful because they have an air of self-awareness to them, in that the imagery is so commonplace that it can sometimes be almost amusing - which makes them feel very human and not as po-faced as many more traditional Romanticist works.

"So in the song I am trying to express the melancholic surge you feel when you experience them, and to relate this to the Millennial search for validation and meaning. And then of course it links back to my own personal feelings of failure and existential pointlessness, as it inevitably does - I was born in the 1980s after all."

Never ones to be shut down by any covid lockdown, ‘Massive Sorrow!’ was recorded last year in Crouch End and will represent Desperate Journalist's fourth full album release in the six years since the ‘Desperate Journalist’ debut appeared in 2015, with sophomore effort ‘Grow Up’ storming out in 2017 and the search for ‘The Search Of The Miraculous’ illuminating 2019. Throw in a couple of now-deleted five-track CDs (‘Good Luck’ and ‘You Get Used To It’) and their melody-shattering proficiency is apparent for all to see. Add in a litany of ten-out-of-ten media reviews and utterly devotional followings from desperate fanboys and fangirls from Birmingham to Berlin and Desperate Journalist’s incredibly credible status is more bulletproof than ever before.

Vaccines willing, Desperate Journalist will be delivering some maxed-up doses of Maximum Sorrow! at these shows here:

JULY 28TH 2020 LONDON BRICK LANE ROUGH TRADE EAST
('Maximum Sorrow!' album launch with live set and signing. Re-scheduled from July 2nd)

SEPTEMBER 11TH 2021 MANCHESTER BREAD SHED (w/ LIINES)
DECEMBER 18TH 2021 SHEFFIELD RECORD JUNKEE
JANUARY 15TH 2022 BRISTOL THEKLA
FEBRUARY 12TH 2022 NOTTINGHAM THE BODEGA
FEBRUARY 19TH 2022 LONDON KINGS CROSS LAFAYETTE

www.desperatejournalist.co.uk