We hope you’ll join us on Friday, August 19th at 5:00 PM when we celebrate the release of The Medium’s new album, For Horses! The album, available via yk Records on vinyl and CD, finds guitarist-vocalist Shane Perry, bassist-vocalist and songwriter Sam Silva, guitarist-vocalist Michael Brudi and percussionist Jared Hicks again working with producer Jake Davis (who produced the band’s previous album, Get It While It’s Hot). The Medium will play a full-band set in the record shop to help welcome their album into the world. We can’t wait to see these songs preformed live and hope you can make it out too! You can go ahead and lock in your copy of For Horses and have one waiting for you at Grimey’s on release day (or mailed directly to you, if that’s how you roll). Visit our webstore here to place your preorder now. All customers who preorder the album for local pickup will also automatically be registered to win an autographed test-pressing of the album on vinyl.
Opening track “Don’t Stay Out” wastes no time signaling the shift, as a dazzling four-part a capella verse gives way to a piano-rock tune punctuated by filigrees of saxophone. Midway through the album, “Let’s Get Together” and “Space Force” form a sort of two-song suite, mirroring each others’ lyrics while showcasing the band’s stylistic breadth: lo-fi southern soul and a serrated, Motown-inspired rave-up.
These songs can be irreverent and heartfelt, sometimes within the span of a single lyric, a tension that’s crucial even as Perry and Silva say it’s not necessarily thought out in advance. “Goodbye Afternoon,” which could scan as either a look back at disappearing youth or an almost deadpan accounting of a day’s end, is one of several songs that seemed to flow out fully formed. “It’s like you’re an archeologist and you dust it off, and there’s a dinosaur,” Perry says. “Still the Best” chronicles the bittersweet feeling of watching friends come and go from your life, not for any conflict but just because that’s how things go sometimes. Silva emerged with “No Highway Cowboys,” on the other hand, from a Wikipedia rabbit-hole on diphthongs. In The Medium’s world, the stirring piano ballad that makes you want to happy-cry can absolutely be called “Space Horse.”
The songs on For Horses “just come to you, and then you kind of derive the meaning from it much later,” Perry explains. “We’ve been sitting with these for a long time.” Though some were written as recently as 2020, others date to well before Get It While It’s Hot; the set’s tightness and consistency is a testament to years of sharpening songs in live settings, and the fact that it’s their first album of songs all written after the band’s formation — it is, as Perry and Brudi both emphasize, “our record.”
This album about leaving home ends with the four members leaving home together. Games of HORSE played outside the home the bandmates shared while writing many of these songs inspired “Four Horses,” a reminder to revel in the moment: “Everybody’s looking for an answer, but they should be splashing in the rain.” They’ve since moved out and into separate places, but the record stands as a monument to their two years in that house. It was a big old white stone thing, Silva remembers, an “ugly building next to a Walgreens.” His smile is audible as he describes it. “It looked great inside.”
IMPORTANT PARKING INFORMATION! Our parking lot is shared with other rad businesses and it is a finite space, so parking is limited. In addition to our lot, there is an inexpensive paid parking lot behind Elegy Coffee and Mickey's on Gallatin Road that is a short walk from the shop. Please use EXTREME CAUTION if parking on the nearby, narrow neighborhood streets. Too many cars make these roads impassable and result in angry neighbors, the police being called, and cars being towed. (This is no fun at all.) If possible, please consider carpooling, ride-sharing, walking, biking, scooting, roller skating, or taking the bus to come see The Medium perform in the record shop.