BOSTON, Mass. [November 8, 2024] – When a band exists in its own realm, things like timelines and chronology only serve to please the outside world. What stirs loudest within a blurred cauldron of the past, present, and future is the music, dangling overhead like a specter, reminding us both of what was and what is right now. For most bands, releasing a new album after 13 years would be seen as a sort of comeback or rebirth. For Count Zero, the genre-straddling Boston alternative band that always sounded like the future while reveling strictly in a moment of insular grandeur, the promise of a new album is just simply what we’ve been expecting all along.
And now we have tangible proof that we are firmly in that right here and right now. Count Zero is set to unveil its fifth studio album, a theatrical 10-track odyssey titled Thought So, on Friday, November 8, with a release party that later night at Sonia is Cambridge. The show is presented by BumbleBee Radio and features musical kindred spirits and fellow scene veterans Lovina Falls and Singer Mali.
Ahead of the album, a new Count Zero single titled “Overthinking” crashes the streams on October 11. The magnetic track with a gentle stomp not only serves as an aural appetizer to the album, but also proves the ambitious glam and art-rock stylings of band composer and ringleader Peter Moore have never really faded over its nearly three-decade career, when Count Zero first emerged from the ashes of cult electronic band Think Tree.
“Our music has always been dense – occasionally one might argue too dense,” Moore muses from his home studio. “Now we’re learning to trust sparseness and space more, trusting the hooks, the vibes, the grooves.”
The awaited follow-up to 2011’s Never Be Yourself, Thought So finds Count Zero as its most assured, no small accomplishment given the confidence the band weaponized to swerve around most of the pitfalls and landmines of the Boston rock scene. And in a weird way, the dystopia of the world around us has finally caught up to the cacotopia weaved delicately within the Count Zero sound for so long.
Since forming in 1996, and along the way employing the likes of Amanda Palmer (whose Dresden Dolls once took the band out on a six-week tour), Elizabeth Steen of Natalie Merchant’s band, and Throwing Muses’ Bernard Georges, Moore and longtime collaborator and confidant Will Ragano have carefully existed in familiar and unfamiliar lanes. With Thought So, those lanes have not only widened, but merged.
When Moore was not touring as lead vocalist for the Blue Man Group’s “How To Be A Megastar” tour, Count Zero could be found on various live stages across the city, on playlists and rotations from the long-gone local radio and media monoliths, and across digital screens around the world, where the band’s more riff-led tracks were played by countless would-be rock and rollers in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games (and as a result, 2011’s “Radium Eyes” is approaching a cool 1 million plays on Spotify).
“It doesn’t hurt that rock itself is such a niche – you can play a million different rock styles and it all sounds like rock to younger folk who only associate it with older generations, if at all,” says Moore, a 2023 Boston Music Awards nominee for Session Musician of the Year. “This band is stronger vocally – we’re doing two- and three-part harmonies that are so challenging I don’t see most bands attempting. I tend to write parts that utilize the talents of the current players in the band.”
That leads to the idea that this version of Count Zero – guitarists and vocalists Moore and Ragano joined today by Shawn Marquis on drums and backing vocals; Jude Heichelbech on keys and vocals; and Mike Corbett on bass and backing vocals – has a renewed focus and creative vision.
“It’s now easier to see what a Count Zero sound might be,” Moore admits. “In contrast to when the band was young, it felt like we were going in different directions — post-punk, funk, noise, sophisticated pop, glam rock, etc. I couldn’t care less about staying ‘on-brand’ because no one style would keep me interested. I still don’t feel natural adhering to a formula, but I think we’re sort of — calcifying into a style without trying.”
That plays out across Thought So’s 10 spirited tracks, all tracked, mixed and produced over the past decade, at various points, some short, some long, between 2014 and 2024, by Moore at his Palace of Purpose in Boston. The record was mastered by Jeff Lipton at Boston’s esteemed Peerless Mastering, with Costanza Tinti as assistant mastering engineer. Select tracks feature a pair of guest musicians in Ken Winokur (percussion on “BigWig”) and Joel Simches (keys on “Tail Bites Dog”).
Knyvet | Substack
News and notes from the Knyvet network, curated by Michael O’Connor Marotta. Click to read Knyvet, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.
###