The Hard Quartet, a new US indie-rock supergroup featuring Stephen Malkmus (Pavement), Emmett Kelly (The Cairo Gang, The Double), Matt Sweeney (Zwan, Chavez) and Jim White (The Dirty Three), have shared the video for their debut single Earth Eater, and announced their first live dates.
The band claim to have "levelled, cultivated, and made lush an entirely new steppe in the ecosystem of guitar-bass-drums-voice agriculture". Which is nice.
Talking to GQ, Matt Sweeney describes the entertainingly surreal claymation video for Earth Eater as a “fully bent public service announcement.”
Watch the video below:
The Hard Quartet have announced debut shows in New York, Los Angeles and London, to take place in October.
They will play:
Oct 10: Los Angeles The Belasco, CA (with Papa M)
Oct 17: New York Webster Hall, NY (with Weak Signal)
Oct 22: LondonElectric Ballroom, UK (with Tubs)
The quartet will be touring extensively in 2025.
Speaking about their future plans, Stephen Malkmus tells GQ, “There’s plenty of times that [bands] come in with luster and things just wither. But I don’t see that happening. If we’re digging it then it continues and blossoms.”
Meanwhile, there's a new film about Malkmus' main band, Pavement, incoming.
Directed by Alex Ross Perry, who directed Ghost's hugely successful Rite Here Rite Now film, Pavements is described as a prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid.
The somewhat tongue-in-cheek blurb for the film, which will premiere as part of the Venice Film Festival, reads: “The film intimately shows the band preparing for their sold-out 2022 reunion tour while simultaneously tracking the preparations for a musical based on their songs, a museum devoted to their history and a big-budget Hollywood biopic inspired by their saga as the most important band of a generation.”
