[Cover photo credit to Madeline Jennings]
Yeasayer co-founder Anand Wilder has released new single “Molly’s Song” from his upcoming LP Psychic Lessons, out 8/22/2025 via Last Gang / MNRK. The track uses piano, drum machine, and Andean-style digital pan flutes.
The official video is also out now, which was directed by documentary filmmaker Derek Howard and “finds Wilder clad in Bowie-esque makeup with liquid light visuals projected directly onto his face and body.”
Wilder will celebrate the release with an album release party + show at The Ripple Room in the Lower East Side on August 22 followed by a Rough Trade in-store performance and signing at the Brooklyn location on September 4.
On the song, Wilder shares:
“My favorite song on the album…This is probably the most direct and honest love song on the album, no personas standing in, just self-analysis inspired by a protracted lover’s quarrel, where you can see certain patterns of behavior are looping, and even though you know that a little tenderness would alleviate the anger, it’s the last thing you feel like doing in the heat of the battle. I think of myself as pretty easy going, but when I cross a certain threshold my instinct is to escalate, get defensive and dig in my heels.
So then the chorus is the flip side, when you’re completely in sync and reconnecting, the depression and anger has miraculously dissipated, you’re out of the impossible loop and you are filled with love and have clarity to reflect on all your stubborn tendencies as foolish and counterproductive. But how do you get out of the irregular loop to reach this love and clarity?”
The video’s director, Derek Howard, adds:
The concept for ‘Molly’s Song’ came from a shared love of liquid light visuals that were really common low-fi concert visuals in the 1960s and ‘70s. People would use overhead projectors and Petri dishes with different-colored solutions to cast these psychedelic visuals directly onto the bands, bathing them in a kaleidoscope of morphing colors. ‘Molly’s Song’ contains themes of drugs so we felt it would be an appropriate homage to those retro stoner visuals that are so strongly associated with altered states and rock and roll.
