Listen to Curtains

If Parenthetical Girls have learned anything over the course of their bewilderingly unorthodox discography, it's that they are—for richer or for poorer—a necessarily singular pop group. It's a peculiarity that they've learned to embrace—a single-minded conviction that pours itself over every corner of their latest album, Privilege (Marriage Records).

Returning to its core membership of vocalist/creative director Zac Pennington and producer/arranger Jherek Bischoff (composer and collaborator with David Byrne, Amanda Palmer, Xiu Xiu, etc.), Privilege retains the group's signature ambitions-visceral intimacy, camp austerity, lurid eloquence—while confidently embracing the perfect pop pastiche their previous records only alluded to. Anchored by Pennington's distinctively lilting vibrato, Privilege is a cascade of grim particulars and gallows humor-an unflinching treatise on privilege, indiscretion, betrayal, sex and class politics, failure, and resignation. This is Parenthetical Girls in fighting trim: unbridled, unambiguous, and with a new creative candor
that's felt in both its words and music.

Privilege is a 12-track statement of purpose: a bold, strikingly cohesive pop clarion call that further solidifies Parenthetical Girls' place amongst the most surprising and uncompromising pop groups at work today.