Jimmy (Indie Exclusive) (Limited) (Hot Pink Vinyl)
Briston MaroneyLPA
- Jimmy (Intro)
- Tomatoes
- Real Good Swimmer
- Better Than You
- Poor Things
- Bullshit
LPB
- Human
- The View
- Land of Light
- DNA
- Sunsetter
- Be Yourself
Today, indie-rock singer songwriter Briston Maroney releases his latest single, “Better Than You.” A bounding tune about menace and ambition and self-judgement that spreads like a virus, the song, co-written with Dan Nigro (Caroline Polachek, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell, Lorde) is the final release ahead of the release of his guitar-heavy, explosive and engrossing new record, JIMMY, out this Friday, May 2 via Atlantic Records. The song premiered on Zane Lowe’s Apple Music Radio 1 show and Maroney is currently the cover of their New Music Daily playlist.
Earlier this year, Maroney teased the record with his first single “Real Good Swimmer,” a masterful and magnetic rock song over which Maroney presents a snapshot of the people who he grew up knowing. He followed the track with a double release of “Tomatoes” and “Bullshit,” two songs depicting two worlds at work. “Tomatoes” is a grungy portrait of post-adolescent confusion and willful idiosyncrasy that arcs into a defiant hook while “Bullshit,” is a three-minute encapsulation of all the conflict in JIMMY.
Maroney, whose catalog has been streamed over 500 million streams, recently opened for The Kooks in Australia and set to his the road with Peach Pit this summer for their co-headline Long Hair, Long Life Tour which includes stops at New York’s Pier 17, Colorado’s infamous Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre.
More on JIMMY….
At least at first, Briston Maroney didn’t want to call his explosive and engrossing third album JIMMY. He wanted to call it Jellyfish, the name taken from a poem he wrote when he was nine: “Jellyfish/The whole ocean/But nowhere to go.” That was a year before Maroney wrote his first song and many years before he had the language to describe what he was feeling, depression. That poem was a pivotal moment for Maroney, since he suddenly understood that he could use art and self-expression—at that point, poetry; for the last two decades, mostly music—to help make sense of the turmoil in his mind, heart, and life. But Maroney eventually realized that the idea of the jellyfish was too hopeless for what’s actually happening on JIMMY, a song cycle about scraping the bottom of mental, social, and emotional barrels and holding on long enough to do what can sometimes seem like life’s true masterpiece: simply being yourself.
Maroney’s folks split up before he was a teenager. Like so many kids, he spent the rest of youth shuttling between two places. With his father in the small and quiet city of Knoxville, Tenn., he was relatively privileged but pressured, a Catholic school student on whom great expectations were placed. With his mother in north Florida, a landscape more raw and real than almost any other in the continental United States, he was surrounded by country folks who only seemed to give a damn about one another. They’d show up for oyster roasts and get red-wine drunk on Saturday, then be spiffy for church by Sunday morning.
Maroney didn’t fit in with either deme, really. He was the country guy who loved fishing at dams with his dad in Knoxville, the city slicker Catholic schoolkid back among the mangroves and slash pines. But he was drawn to the devil-may-care spirit of the Floridians, the folks who only wanted to look after each other and themselves. There was one man in particular—perpetually clad in denim shorts and a white Margaritaville T, occasionally a durag—that caught Maroney’s attention. Sure, maybe he was a redneck, but “he was a good friend who people loved,” Maroney remembers. He became the inspiration for JIMMY, for these songs about trying to be nothing more than yourself.
