BIG STIR RECORDS is proud to finish our release year with a new single that's a bright omen of things to come in 2024: the first new music from THE ARMOIRES in over two years. “Music & Animals” is a sweet song of solace in difficult times, directly from the band's hearts. Having been aptly featured on the Bandcamp-only charity compilation Embers Of Aloha: A Maui Wildfire Benefit Project, the track sees release as a standalone single on all digital platforms on December 22.

“How do we get by in this world?” ask The Armoires at the start of “Music & Animals,” and their answer is in the title. Perhaps the brightest and breeziest tune the band has ever penned, it finds co-leaders Christina Bulbenko (keyboards) and Rex Broome (guitar) turning to the twin comforts of their animal companions and the creative process itself as ways of coping with the challenges of day-to-day life in the 21st Century. More than ever before, and very much by design, their signature harmonies present themselves as the voice of a singular, ambiguously androgynous entity, and along with their bandmates (violist Larysa Bulbenko, drummer John Borack and bassist Clifford Ulrich) they create a timeless soundscape that's equal parts '60s sunshine pop, '80s Southern jangle, '90s chamber pop in the Sarah Records/C86 idiom, and something uniquely their own. Unapologetically twee but the farthest thing from saccharine, it's the sound of a band turning inward for solace and arriving at a place that will be familiar to anyone who's bonded with a beloved pet, or had their life saved by a song. They even have a name for that destination: Octoberland, a nod to the title of their forthcoming album, expected, appropriately enough, in Autumn of 2024.

Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the Southern California indie pop quintet's formation, and “Music & Animals” sounds like both a new beginning and a definitive distillation of the band's distinctive sound. “Our producer Michael Simmons (of sparkle*jets u.k.) told us that our souls are in this song, and he's probably right about that,” says Bulbenko. “We were near the end of writing the new record, which was a kind of magical experience taking us out of our daily lives. We all see these as deeply troubling times, and I've always said that the only things that get us through it all are music and animals... our relationships with creativity, and with our pets. That was very much on our minds, and this was the last song we finished. It just sort of arrived out of nowhere and felt like the summation of everything we were chasing on the album, and maybe everything we're about as a band!”

“All of the songs on the new album find us sort of digging beneath the surface of modern life and tapping into the shared myths, folklore, and storytelling traditions underneath,” adds Broome. “Those things help us view reality through a more instinctive creative lens. That's profoundly beautiful, but also a little bit spooky... and the same thing's true of having pets. They're a little bit of wildness we choose to include in our daily lives. Adorable but eldritch, as the lyrics say.” Those same descriptors might sum up the song, and even The Armoires themselves: eerily comforting, invitingly otherworldly. With “Music & Animals,” they set out on the road for Octoberland, and they'd love to have you along for the journey.