by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
New York City’s Snakeskin is set to follow up their incredible 2019 effort, Hangnail, with a new EP, Heart Orb Bone. Due out on July 13th via State Champion Records, the release is part of a trio of picture discs with custom screen printed art that also includes new EPs from Noun (aka Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females) and TVO. Produced by Paternoster and engineered by Eric Bennett, we’re once again reminded that Snakeskin’s Shanna Polley is a profoundly great songwriter. Her songs carry a quality to them reminiscent of early 90’s alternative rock smash hits, complete with swelling hooks and guitars that both carry the melody but surge with heavy pop-friendly riffs. Joined by Charlotte Kahn, Matt Elkin, and John Shields, the band’s latest effort captures every bit of what makes Snakeskin one of the city’s most promising underground bands.
The album’s title track and lead single is “Heart Orb Bone,” a song that feels familiar without necessarily calling to mind anything in particular. Polley writes with such clarity that the song feels embedded in your mind, pictures that come progressively out from your memory, as she sings about “kicking rocks in the parking lot.” The video, directed by William Bottini, captures Polley together with a bunch of awesome old toys, all sporting an adorable smiley face. As she looks curiously around her setting, a transformation begins to take place… but we don’t want to spoil anything.
Speaking about the video, Bottini shared:
"‘Heart Orb Bone’ is a game we made up in a parking lot in Eugene, Oregon while on our way to see the total eclipse of 2017. The rules were simple: throw a rock on the ground, draw a chalk shape around it, and slowly lose your mind in the heat until it was time to continue our journey. We stared straight up as the moon bowled past the sun in the sky, and then we went home.
Then, one day, we were watching a Baby Einstein video on YouTube. For some reason, we were compelled to mute the audio and instead play “Shadow,” a haunting orchestral track from Ernst Reijseger’s soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. In the film, Herzog documents the drawings of Chauvet Cave: the holographic dreams of ancient humans, reaching out from the stone-age past into our present. As our tears overflowed, the TV screen lit our room, drawing its many trinkets in relief."