With love and pride, Preoccupations present to you: Ill at Ease, our 5th long play and our first on the Born Losers record label. After thousands of hours of scrutinizing over every last detail of this record, I find myself with the unenviable task of now trying to explain why we made the thing, what the thing is, and who we are. We’ve been defining and redefining for a mostly very lucky 13 years. Lucky if not counting all of the broken bones, broken vehicles, exploding gear, stolen gear, lost baggage, lost friends, lost hearing, and lost minds. We once thought some of these misfortunes might be exceptional, but getting older we realize these are all just things that come with the territory, and the rewards we get for the passing of time. We’ve played 400+ shows across the globe, usually living and working together in claustrophobic quarters. We’ve aged together, making albums along the way. Some have even been reasonably acclaimed, others have been merely tolerated. Which brings us to the now and our album Ill at Ease. It’s hard to say how it fits into our canon, but it’s definitely drawing from places or genres that we haven’t drawn from in the past. Whether we want to admit it or not, any music we’re currently listening to is, I’m sure, always informing our collective subconscious. The well of dark things to write about seemingly has not dried up, and lyrically, it’s where I still tend to draw from. Draining all my anxieties into a song is often the only way I can get through a day. Some songs exist in a world with barren plains of burnt earth, covered in a dust of shame, dread, death, where all the things I love are things that kill me. Some come from the perspective of another distant world, looking skyward into a science fiction ocean of space, solitude, slight hope. Sometimes I’m looking around at the world that we live in now with incredulity, hilariously dissatisfied with how it’s all turned out, and assuming that it can’t be long before it’s all over. Some songs are just a reflection of me looking down at my feet while I trudge along wondering what I’m doing with myself, and if the ground is going to fall out from underneath me at any given moment. At the end of it all though, this is simply another collection of new songs, and after 13 years, it is our pleasure and our privilege to still be making new things and to be sharing these new worlds we’ve created. For now, the ground is still firmly beneath us, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it might not be for long, and we will forever be, Ill at Ease.