Details United Crushers

‘United Crushers’ (March 4 Memphis Industries) is POLIÇA’s third full length release and most remarkable album to date. The band, which includes Channy Leaneagh, dual drummers, Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu and Chris Beirden on bass with producer Ryan Olson at the helm, collectively wrote the album in Minneapolis in the winter of 2015 during their first true break from two years of touring. They recorded it at the renowned Sonic Ranch Studios in El Paso, TX, nestled just a few short miles from the US/Mexico border.

The new album builds on POLIÇA’s signature synthesizer and percussion-heavy sounds with more complex arrangements and a bigger, crisper hi fi punch due to the new approach they took to writing and recording together, all in the same room. There’s a tighter groove to these songs and a more vulnerable quality to them, especially in Leaneagh’s singing. Her incredible vocal range is on display throughout, beautifully raw and less electronically effected than on previous recordings.

Channy says of first single Lime Habit: “these lyrics are most diary like of any of the other songs on United Crushers. It’s all observations on my mode of operation and how it affects where I go. I’m speaking to myself mostly; “never in the corner is the luck of life . . . so get out of the corner and . . . you see up higher but you’re never in style”.

The band will play a series of shows in the lead up to the album release kicking off in Berlin on Feb 11, with stops in London (Feb 15), NYC (Feb 19) and Chicago (Feb 22), culminating in three hometown performances in Minneapolis March 2, 3 and 4 and followed by a full US tour, to include a stop at SXSW.

The themes found and explored on ‘United Crushers’ are political and personal, touching on social injustice, self-doubt and isolation, the urban decline and gentrification, overcoming music industry machinations, and finding true and honest love in the wake of it all. Even at its darkest, the record is musically the band’s most upbeat and celebratory. It is a weapon meant to empower the weak, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised.

‘United Crushers’ is the follow up to 2013’s ‘Shulamith’ which EW described as being “propulsive enough for dance floors, and dreamy enough for headphones” and MOJO said “proves that intelligent pop music still has the ability to seduce and enthral.” Their debut, 2012’s ‘Give You The Ghost,’ also garnered international acclaim, with Rolling Stone hailing it as “the sound of heartbreak and celebration happening simultaneously” and Q praising it as “a bewitching, urgent, magical debut.” The band has conquered massive festivals around the world from Coachella to Glastonbury in addition to performing on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Later With Jools Holland and more.