Sylvan Esso Announce ‘No Rules Sandy,’ Share ‘Didn’t Care’
The band unveiled the album during their set at Newport Folk Festival.
On August 12, 2022, Sylvan Esso will release their most fearless and frenetic, intimate and enigmatic album to date: No Rules Sandy.
After surprising the audience of Newport Folk Festival just moments ago with a live performance of the project in its entirety, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn have marked the official launch and full embrace of their next, unpredictable chapter. Defined by a mentality of directness and disregard for preconceptions, Meath says that No Rules Sandy “feels like who we actually are. It just feels like us. We’re not trying to fit into the mold, just happily being our freak selves.”
“I think that the ultimate effect of our last record and the pandemic has been the feeling of like, ‘F__k that, I know what I want,’” adds Sanborn. “And it’s now, or never. So let’s get out there and do it.”
Tracing the emotional journey from a humble meeting to life-changing love, “Didn’t Care” builds on recent singles “Sunburn” and “Your Reality.” Like much of No Rules Sandy, the song leaps from the framework of pop music into a wilder unknown, full of the loose, live-wire energy that inspired the album’s unforeseen creation.
Sylvan Esso had never been a band who could make a record on short-term writing jags, let alone the best of their career. But at the beginning of 2022, they drove from their home of Durham, NC to Los Angeles, CA, where they set up a makeshift studio in a small rental house and wrote a song. Then another, and another, until a full record took shape and they found themselves impressing each other like never before.
Describing their first three albums as a trilogy that is now complete—following multiple GRAMMY nominations and countless other, crowning milestones—No Rules Sandy marks the beginning of a new era that is stranger and more cathartic than Meath and Sanborn have ever been.
