Today, Petite League shares the intense new single “Sugar Hotel,” the second installment in what frontman Lorenzo Gillis Cook is calling their Song of the Month EP. The first was the charming, hypnotizing “East River Swimmer” back in August, which utilized the soft, slightly grungy tones present on their recent album Thrill Seekers. “Sugar Hotel,” however, with its sharp, piercing guitar melodies, evokes the brilliant jagged viscerality present in their 2016 debut, with acerbic drums from Henry Schoonmaker as well as tongue-in-cheek narrative intensity to match. In this track, it seems to be a romantic rendezvous gone wrong (or very right). “Packed light cause we don’t need much/ we got each other now and the sense of touch,” Gillis Cook prefaces; “House cleaning praying cuz they think we’re dead,” he admits later, the intonation of vocals and instrumentals drenched in fervid, white-knuckled euphoria, perfectly encapsulating the confusing, yet oddly enchanting disorientation of infatuation. “So sweet/ Like a kick in the teeth,” he summarizes at the end of each verse, before a blazing guitar solo where every note sounds like a papercut. There’s a tantalizing current of devotion and danger coursing through this track, but also houses an earnest shamelessness that works to subvert the old “love is pain” cliche; “she wants to be found/ guilty,” he explains in the chorus, in response to his telling her “I want you” not once, but twice, the equivalent of a sudden – yet ultimately calculated – dive into the freezing waters of a hotel pool.
“Sugar Hotel” is out now.
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photo courtesy of artist
kid with a vinyl 