Chris Church “Obsolete Path”

BIG STIR RECORDS is delighted to announce the March 28 release of a brand new full-length album from widely-revered North Carolina indie rocker CHRIS CHURCH: OBSOLETE PATH. Featuring the just-released indie hit “Sit Down”, the upcoming single “She Looks Good In Black” and focus track “Life On A Trampoline”, it’s Church’s most accomplished and invigorating work yet, a standout even among an acclaimed catalog including the 2017 breakthrough Limitations Of Source Tape and his 2023 ’80s-influenced masterwork Radio Transient.

Every CHRIS CHURCH album is unique, united only by the emotive firepower of his voice and his gift for memorable melodies and haunting lyrical turns of phrase. If there’s any other throughline, it’s Church’s determination to explore one unique sound to its fullest potential across one set of songs, before his restless muse presents the next genre challenge for him to tackle. That’s taken him from the pure power pop of Limitations Of Source Tape to the hard-rock “heavy melody” of Backwards Compatible (2020), the lo-fi immediacy of Game Dirt (2021), the spooky sludge rock of Darling Please (2022) and most recently Radio Transient. That watershed album virtually invents a genre of its own, one its creator dubbed “Buckingham-Fixx” for its marriage of sleek radio-friendly pop and jittery New Wave quirk, and it yielded Church his biggest hits yet on the global indie airwaves along with the expected critical accolades (landing on Year’s Best albums lists from the US to the UK to France). Fans could only wonder what Chris would do next.

On the dazzling new OBSOLETE PATH, the answer turns out to be… almost everything he’s done before and more, with every bit of the inventive freshness that has marked each outing to date. It would be misleading to call the new album “eclectic”; it’s simply too coherent, purposeful and passionate to be viewed as a collection of genre exercises. What Chris Church does here is to bring together many of the musical strands he’s pursued – the prior album’s frantic ’80s pop sound (on “Sit Down” and “I’m A Machine”), pop-flavored hard rock (“Running Right Back To You”), jangly alt-rock (“Life On A Trampoline”), sludgy grunge (“Like A Sucker”) and polished radio-ready popcraft (“I Don’t Wanna Be There”) – and adds to them strains of the prog-leaning complexity (“Vice Versa”) and heartfelt country and folk rock with which he’s always flirted. But the stamp Church has put on all these idioms across his deep back catalog insures that they all come home sounding like no one else: they belong together, all part of the same story and the unmistakable work of an inimitable artist.