Spin Doctors' first new album in over a decade, Face Full of Cake, was years in the making for the band and worth the wait for the rest of us.
Frontman Chris Barron and drummer Aaron Comess tell Q104.3 New York's Out of the Box with Jonathan Clarke that after their reunion in the early-2000s, it was difficult for the band to find motivation to write new material until the COVID pandemic left them with little else to do but revisit unfinished ideas and come up with new ones.
"It was just a really good vibe, it was easy," Comess said of the band's first post-COVID sessions. "Sometimes the creative thing can be a struggle. Sometimes it just happens. It felt a lot like the beginning where the songs were just really organic and we were having a really good time. We came up with this really cool batch of material."
At the top of the heap of the new material is the lead single "Still a Gorilla," a spartan, memorable alt rock tune with multi-dimensional lyric with an elastic tempo, punctuated by subversive time signature changes in the verses and tempo shifts in the prechorus.
"That was a very compelling piece of music that Aaron had floating around for quite a long time," Barron recalled. "When I write lyrics for these guys' music, sometimes i have a lyrics that's laying around that just fits but other times I'll write something bespoke ... I was sort of stumped for a long time. ... And then he sent me that Robyn song 'Konichiwa, Bitches.' I listened to that song, it was so funny and tongue-in-cheek, just got me out of myself ... So after 10 years I wrote the lyric in a half and hour."
Check out the full interview via the player above!
For more about Face Full of Cake and Spin Doctor's tour dates, go here.
Check out the official lyric video for "Still A Gorilla":
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