Sex Week aren’t satisfied.
The Brooklyn band’s self-titled debut EP landed in late 2024, and as far as introductions go, set quite the bar. With the playful slowcore of “Toad Mode” and the midnight pop of “Angel Blessings” the band seemed to solidify their spot in the exciting underground of hotly-tipped NYC acts overnight. Press at FADER & Rolling Stone. Playlist covers at Spotify. Airplay on KEXP & KCRW. A US tour on the books for this Spring, and rumblings of international festivals like Green Man on the horizon.
“How do we do what we just did, but better,” muses co-vocalist Pearl Amanda Dickson, a relative newcomer to the songwriting world. Sex Week started in 2022 when her now-partner Richard Orofino – a prolific musician & producer since he was in grade school – fell in love with her taste via a wildly eclectic playlist she made for his roommate.
If new single “Coat” is any indication, their unique chemistry has somehow propelled them over the bar they set for themselves last year. Time, they learned, is a necessary ingredient on the batch of as-yet-unfinished material this new song is pulled from. “We felt we had a lot more time to live with the songs as we were creating them,” Orofino says. “It totally changed the way they ended up.”
So where the music of their debut felt like momentarily glimpses of something scary and exciting – here things feel far more visceral, a focused punch delivered directly from the gut. “Coat” is a defiant dirge that flirts with a peak only to submerge itself back into a sinister oblivion of grumbling synths every time. Like the band that birthed it, the song isn’t satisfied. It loops back on itself patiently, while its lightly psychedelic music video (directed by the band themselves) follows a similar trick, splitting the screen with a mirror causing the same images to melt into themselves.
It’s a confident package, demonstrating Orofino and Dickson’s further mastery of a set of skills and songwriting alchemy they’ll never stop pushing to be better.