Stream Folk Implosion’s First New Songs In 19 Years

Lou Barlow has a whole lot going on these days: The Dinosaur Jr. reunion, his ongoing career as leader of Sebadoh, his solo music. And now another Barlow project has come back to life. Barlow and his pen-pal John Davis started the Folk Implosion in 1993, and the duo scored an honest-to-god hit two years later when their ominous banger “Natural One” appeared on the Kids soundtrack. Folk Implosion haven’t released any new music since the 2003 album The New Folk Implosion, but they just dropped a new EP, their first new music in 19 years, this morning.

Last year, Barlow and Davis announced that they’d gotten back together to work on new music, and that’s why we put Folk Implosion on our list of this year’s most anticipated albums. Davis actually left Folk Implosion after the release of the 1999 album One Part Lullaby, and Barlow recorded The New Folk Implosion on his own. So depending on whether you think The New Folk Implosion is canon, the new Folk Implosion EP Feel It If You Feel It really represents the duo’s first work in 23 years. They started working together again remotely in 2020 and got back together in person last year, co-producing the new EP with Scott Solter.

Feel It If You Feel It features two new Folk Implosion tracks, “Don’t Give It Away” and “Had Enough.” Both songs find the rare combination of elements — ramshackle lo-fi folk-rock, rickety bedroom beats, slinky and deceptive sense of pop songcraft — that made Folk Implosion so singular in the first place. It’s truly wild to hear new music that sounds like this in 2022. The EP also features remixes of both new songs, and those remixes also sound extremely ’90s. Stream the new EP below.

The Feel It If You Feel It EP is out now on John Davis’ label Inundation Records. On their Bandcamp page, the Folk Implosion claim that they’ll spend the rest of the year working on a new album. I, for one, could definitely go for a whole LP that sounds like those two songs.