Popular Music is the name of the group. The name is not ironic. The Melbourne-based duo of former Parenthetical Girls leader Zac Pennington and composer Prudence Rees-Lee, Popular Music was born in Los Angeles. The shadow of the Hollywood sign still lingers over their sound: weird, hauntological pop built on lush string arrangements and analog electronics, where threads of grief, myth-making, and memory twist toward the tragic-comic.
They’re touring now behind Against Men, a sardonic, seven-song treatise against hope, surrender, and the everyday disappointment of the unfair sex.
“One of the year’s most inventive, hypnotic concept albums” — The A.V Club
“Truly astounding… exists in a realm inhabited by Sparks and Destroyer’s storied and theatrically minded lyricism with hints of Scott Walker and Gary Numan. Quite simply, there is nothing minor about this work.” — The Quietus
“Beautifully ornate pop with a haunted heart” — Bandcamp
“Popular Music seem to have not just created a soundtrack, but a whole world… there remains nobody quite like them and they’re all the more intriguing as a result.” — For The Rabbits
Popular Music is the Melbourne-based cinematic duo of Zac Pennington (née Parenthetical Girls, Xiu Xiu) and composer Prudence Rees-Lee. The name is literal. Their debut LP is Minor Works — a widescreen record written for the end of time, and the first Pennington-penned album in a decade. Recorded across three continents, Minor Works’ ambitious productions were pieced together in sessions between Los Angeles, Melbourne, Moscow and New York — with percussion by Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, contributions from celebrated composer Jherek Bischoff (Angel Olsen, Xiu Xiu, David Byrne), plus a 17-piece Russian chamber orchestra conducted over Zoom (no, really). Live, Popular Music strips back to electro-pop efficiency — deploying a small arsenal of analog synthesizers for maximum melodramatic effect.
POPULAR MUSIC ANNOUNCES NEW MINI ALBUM, AGAINST MEN, OUT APRIL 18
Popular Music — the Melbourne-based synth-pop duo of former Parenthetical Girls leader Zac Pennington and composer Prudence Rees-Lee — announces their forthcoming album, Against Men, out April 18 via the group’s own Sanitarium Sound Services imprint.
The album’s title is a playful yet pointed provocation — sardonic shorthand for the everyday betrayals, minor tragedies, and persistent disappointments of the unfair sex. Self-produced and recorded at Melbourne’s legendary MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio), the group drew on the studio’s unrivaled collection of historic electronic instruments, evoking the tones and textures of hauntological pioneers like Joe Meek, Daphne Oram, and Delia Derbyshire, alongside the early post-punk experimentations of Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. The result is a leaner, more intimate approach, following the ambitious scale of their acclaimed 2023 album, Minor Works.
Throughout Against Men, Popular Music blends classic pop structures with avant-garde ambition, crafting narrative-driven short stories that feel at once timeless and unsettlingly immediate. Each track contributes to the album’s widescreen atmosphere, conjuring imagined pasts, obscured presents, and futures that will never arrive.
There’s the glam-rock shuffle of lead single “Passover,” whose shimmering T.Rex swagger belies a subtle indictment: “For there are no good men/And I’m no exception.” Elsewhere, songs function like brief cinematic portraits — “Crying,” a baroque synth-ballad where nostalgia becomes performance (“Those waterworks still flow / But now it’s just for show”), while “Emily Says” echoes Lou Reed empathetic character studies with a tale of a woman exhausted by the banal cruelties of self described feminist men (“When surely everybody knows / Those wolves are wearing women’s clothes”). In “Desert Motel #1,” romantic disintegration unfolds with Cohen-esque grace and devastation, while the haunted obsessions of “Black Shroud” cast a hypnotically shadow over the album.
Against Men moves toward its emotional apex with “Providence St.,” a melancholic meditation elevated by celebrated composer Jherek Bischoff’s elegiac string arrangements, and the epic closer “The Last Night of Our Lives,” an eight-minute elegy steeped in romantic fatalism and ironic resilience: “Well-read and welfare-bred and more dead than alive / well, nevermind.”
Originally released as a tour only cassette that quickly sold out, Against Men arrives digitally for the first time, accompanied by a second cassette edition available exclusively on Popular Music’s upcoming European and UK tour in May and June 2025.
Sad Songs
https://youtu.be/BnAW2xbSI38?si=hakQz3KZkWf-vJaE
Jennifer
https://youtu.be/oMSQ7jD_hk4?si=IrQQS-q5lYmSX-9q
Lifetime Achievement
https://youtu.be/jlIJmRXG4cc?si=282uO7Opl5mMfB-B
Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7hHfNvpy7tvyrl2nqSMBVW?si=TpZi372xT3mXPERApLCG1w
linktree
https://linktr.ee/popularmusic
Website
https://www.popularmusic.rip/
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/thisispopularmusic
Bandcamp
https://thisispopularmusic.bandcamp.com/music
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