BIG STIR RECORDS is delighted to announce the March 28 release of a brand new full-length album from widely-revered North Carolina indie rocker CHRIS CHURCH: OBSOLETE PATH. Featuring the just-released indie hit “Sit Down”, the upcoming single “She Looks Good In Black” and focus track “Life On A Trampoline”, it's Church's most accomplished and invigorating work yet, a standout even among an acclaimed catalog including the 2017 breakthrough Limitations Of Source Tape and his 2023 '80s-influenced masterwork Radio Transient. The CD edition is up for pre-order and OBSOLETE PATH can be pre-saved for streaming at:

https://orcd.co/chrischurch-op

Every CHRIS CHURCH album is unique, united only by the emotive firepower of his voice and his gift for memorable melodies and haunting lyrical turns of phrase. If there's any other throughline, it's Church's determination to explore one unique sound to its fullest potential across one set of songs, before his restless muse presents the next genre challenge for him to tackle. That's taken him from the pure power pop of Limitations Of Source Tape to the hard-rock “heavy melody” of Backwards Compatible (2020), the lo-fi immediacy of Game Dirt (2021), the spooky sludge rock of Darling Please (2022) and most recently Radio Transient. That watershed album virtually invents a genre of its own, one its creator dubbed “Buckingham-Fixx” for its marriage of sleek radio-friendly pop and jittery New Wave quirk, and it yielded Church his biggest hits yet on the global indie airwaves along with the expected critical accolades (landing on Year's Best albums lists from the US to the UK to France). Fans could only wonder what Chris would do next.

On the dazzling new OBSOLETE PATH, the answer turns out to be... almost everything he's done before and more, with every bit of the inventive freshness that has marked each outing to date. It would be misleading to call the new album “eclectic”; it's simply too coherent, purposeful and passionate to be viewed as a collection of genre exercises. What Chris Church does here is to bring together many of the musical strands he's pursued – the prior album's frantic '80s pop sound (on “Sit Down” and “I'm A Machine”), pop-flavored hard rock (“Running Right Back To You”), jangly alt-rock (“Life On A Trampoline”), sludgy grunge (“Like A Sucker”) and polished radio-ready popcraft (“I Don't Wanna Be There”) – and adds to them strains of the prog-leaning complexity (“Vice Versa”) and heartfelt country and folk rock with which he's always flirted. But the stamp Church has put on all these idioms across his deep back catalog insures that they all come home sounding like no one else: they belong together, all part of the same story and the unmistakable work of an inimitable artist.

It might come as a surprise that, for a southern singer-songwriter decades into his career, Americana-leaning rootsiness is one of Church's least-explored musical avenues, but his excursions onto that terrain shine on OBSOLETE PATH like never before. The record is bookended by two confessional singer-songwriter tunes, the title track and “What Are We Talking About”, each showcasing Chris at his intimate and visceral best. The pair of terrific country rockers on the record – “The Great Divide” and the single “She Looks Good In Black” with its unforgettable opening couplet “I had to let go of her hand/She left to see a Satanic band” – would be the envy of any band ever tagged as part of the No Depression movement. But it's on the disarmingly open and absolutely lovely “Tell Me What You Really Are” that all of the album's threads, musical and thematic, come together: written the night Chris met his now-wife (and the album's co-producer) Lori Franklin, it's waited nearly 20 years to be recorded and released, and stands as the centerpiece of OBSOLETE PATH.

Church's instinctive brilliance as a lyricist and crafter of often cryptic, sometimes humorous, always-compelling imagery can't go without a mention, and the songs and stories of OBSOLETE PATH find him at the height of his powers. The unifying lyrical concerns on the record are yet one more factor bringing the breathtaking array of sounds into complete harmony. “The theme of the album is, among other interpretations everyone is free to glean, the obstinance it can take to retain basic hope as one gets older and the world gets weirder,” Chris explains. “Realizing that hope and love are the only things worth fighting for comes with the knowledge that magic comes less often, if you don't fight to retain some of your innocence. It's not just about the inevitability of death, it's choosing a path that may seem to be becoming obsolete for the sake of your soul, no matter how old you are.”

“When you're bored of how your natural cynicism is telling you nothing matters, you have to decide if you're just going to let your heart check out,” Church continues. “I think part of what was on my mind for these songs is how to turn willful self-delusion into a workable scenario.” Helping him to realize that vision, in addition to c0-producer Franklin, are a trio of returning collaborators: backing vocalist Lindsay Murray (of Gretchen's Wheel) and in-demand mixing wizard Nick Bertling, both by now gloriously simpatico fixtures on Church's recordings, and drummer Brian Beaver from his prog-metal side-band Däng. With Chris handling all the other instrumental duties (save for power pop legend Bill Lloyd contributing mandolin the to co-written “Vice Versa”), the team of long-term collaborators provide a unifying sound to the diverse ambitions of the record.

The album, then, is the sound of an accomplished and widely-traveled artist bringing it all back home. It's also that rare work which, touching as it does on all of Chris Church's diverse influences, serves as both a career summation and an ideal introduction despite being completely, unmistakably and bracingly new and of its time. In short, it's a new high point in catalog already packed with modern classics. It's sure to leave longtime and freshly-minted fans completely satisfied, with only one familiar question left: after leading us up the OBSOLETE PATH, where will CHRIS CHURCH take us next?