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Ground Control Touring Welcomes Poliça

Posted 04/17/2019

We are excited to announce that Poliça has joined the Ground Control Touring roster. If the opening moments of Poliça’s new album, United Crushers, leave you feeling unsettled, then Channy Leaneagh has done her job. With her voice pitch-shifted down into an ominous, nearly unrecognizable register, she sings of a post-industrial urban landscape littered with broken promises, a land of poverty and violence that’s been rigged against us from the start. Despite all that, though, there is an element of defiance, a refusal to surrender in her delivery of the lyrics. Halfway through that first track, “Summer Please,” when her gorgeous true singing voice enters on top of the deep and disturbing baritone, there is a moment of hope and transcendence, and it’s the key to unlocking United Crushers, Poliça’s third full-length release and most ambitious album to date. Even at its darkest, the record is musically the band’s most upbeat and celebratory. It is a weapon meant to empower the weak, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised; it’s very creation an act of rebellion in the face of the such forces as repression, social injustice, and one’s own self-doubt and isolation.

As political as the statements on the record are, United Crushers is also a deeply personal album. Leaneagh reminds herself to stand firm in the face of self-doubt and manipulation on “Lime Habit,” overcomes music industry machinations with triumphant horns on “Baby Sucks,” and recognizes important truths of independence on “Lose You.” Stringing the songs together is a thematic thread of isolation: the fear of being alone, the instinct to hide our true selves for protection, the way in which lovers can each retreat inwards.

Throughout it all, though, there always remains a sense of defiance and celebration in the music to counter those apprehensions and anxieties. Leaneagh suspects it may have its roots in her early days as a folk singer. “When you sing old folk songs about sad things, it does something to your heart that actually uplifts it,” she says. “I believe that about these songs, too.”

Keep up with all of the latest tour dates and news for Poliça on their artist page.