It’s been a while since we’ve seen Warpaint: Their latest album, Heads Up, was released in 2016. Now, though, the group is back with “Lilys,” their first new material in half a decade. The track features on the new HBO series Made For Love and it’s a moody synth-driven track that’s a natural progression for the band as we last heard them.
The band’s Theresa “TT” Wayman spoke about the song with NME, saying:
“The HBO show wanted to use it and so that made us finish it faster, and then the label heard it and were like, ‘Actually, we want to put this out, not just have it be on the show’. It wasn’t like we started writing our album and were like, ‘OK, this song is going to be the one we come out with,’ but I’m happy that it’s the one leading the way. The song is asserting itself. […] It’s one of those ones that came out of the woodwork and showed itself. We weren’t digging for it. We threw together this rough edit of an arrangement and that worked. Our manager and our co-producer [Sam Petts-Davies] for the album heard it and were like, ‘There’s something in this.’ Once they started shining a light on it, I tried some vocals and those came out really quickly and the lyrics fell together really quickly. It felt really good.”
She also discussed the band’s next album, which is current expected to come out in the spring of 2022. She said of the recording process:
“We got really lucky because the foundation of what we’ve recorded was recorded together. It would feel really disjointed if we had to write it from scratch from afar. It’s actually been amazing that we’ve been separate and had time to record the top layers and we can get even more considered with them. It’s really helping us that there are no time pressures and money constraints. […] I’ve been thinking a lot about lyrics and so I’ve been thinking about [Bob] Dylan a lot and how he strings a story together. He finds these perfect ways to say something that is so normal, it’s something that everyone experiences, but he unlocks this great metaphor for it.”
Listen to “Lilys” above.