AJJ – a.k.a. folk-punk legends Sean Bonnette (guitar/vox), Ben Gallaty (bass), Preston Bryant (guitar/keys), Mark Glick (cello), and Kevin Higuchi (drums) – announce their eighth studio album, and debut for Hopeless Records. Recorded in 2022 in various studios across the Southwest with the band recording as a five-piece for the first time, ‘Disposable Everything’ boasts apocalyptic themes and imagery like all the best AJJ records. But while it follows the outbreak of a pandemic and AJJ’s eerily prescient January 2020 album ‘Good Luck Everybody,’ the new LP is less a prophesying mirror held to a burning world than one inspired by personal grief and about what happens when you reach the other side. In fact, it’s a vital, important, and beautiful album that’ll make you feel better about everything while telling you just how terrible everything is at the same time.
To celebrate the album announcement, AJJ shared two new singles – the album’s title track ‘Disposable Everything’ and ‘Dissonance.’ These two songs follow the recently released ‘The Baby Panda,’ with ‘Disposable Everything’ spelling out the damaging impact of late capitalism while still shimmering with hope. Sean Bonnette says: “This video came together really naturally. My oldest friend is a master puppeteer by the name of Gwendolyn Bonar. We went to kindergarten together. I reached out to her at the beginning of December to gauge her interest in working with us on a video, to which she replied “Yeah, let’s get weird.” So I called Joe Stakun, director of AJJ‘s classic video Goodbye Oh Goodbye and in less than a month we were shooting the video at the Great Arizona Puppet Theater.”
“The puppets used in the film are all made of trash and found materials, and coincidentally, so were the lenses that (director of photography) Eric Bader used in the shoot. Turns out his pandemic project was making camera lenses from broken camera equipment, found glass, and pipe fittings. As soon as he heard the song he knew what he had been building them for.”
‘Disposable Everything’ Tracklist:
01. Strawberry (Probably)
02. Dissonance
03. Moon Valley High
04. Death Machine
05. White Ghosts
06. Disposable Everything
07. Sean
08. The Baby Panda
09. A Thought of You
10. Candles of Love
11. I Hate Rock and Roll Again
12. Schadenfreude
13. I Wanna Be Your Dog 2
14. All of My Woulds
15. In the Valley
‘Disposable Everything’
‘Dissonance’