Brooklyn Synth-Pop Group Nation of Language Share New Single “The Wall & I”

Synth-pop trio Nation of Language share their latest single, the slick yet cacophonous “The Wall & I,” from their forthcoming debut album Introduction, Please, out May 22. Earlier this month, Paste named the record one of our most-anticipated albums of May.

The Brooklyn-based band have so far shared the singles “Friend Machine,” “September Again,” “Tournament” and “Rush & Fever” this year ahead of the release of Introduction, Please. While this marks the band’s first album, Nation of Language have been releasing impressive singles for the past couple years, with 2018’s “Reality” landing on Paste’s Daily Dose almost exactly two years ago.

Lead vocalist and songwriter Ian Devaney said of their latest single:

The hardest part of the creative process for me are those moments when things don’t flow naturally at all, and you just have to sit and slug it out with your own brain, all the while knowing that you might spend hours mining your memories and working through feelings only to end up with nothing useable on the other side. In the time since writing ‘The Wall & I,’ itself a product of many such fruitless hours, I have tried to make a mental adjustment to see the struggle itself as a kind of conceptual or performative dance—to make the conscious choice to spend a whole day locked in battle with my own aspirations wrestling against actual outcomes. As good as it feels to just sit down and knock a song out, there is a different level of satisfaction when you feel like you’ve bled a little bit and truly earned it.

Listen to “The Wall & I” below, and you can pre-order Introduction, Please here.