What is this new normal we are living in, and how long are we going to put up with it? That question drives “New Normal,” the explosive new single from Los Angeles alt rock collective MASHA. and the Fam, out now. It began in Baltimore in 2015, in the days after Freddie Gray died in police custody, and it took frontwoman Masha Alexis nine years to finish. Today, with immigration raids in the headlines and Americans heading to the polls this November, it sounds more urgent than ever.
Gray was arrested and placed in the back of a police van without a seatbelt, then driven on what news reports described as a “rough ride,” a form of police brutality in which a handcuffed prisoner is thrown around an erratically driven vehicle. His cervical spine cracked, and he died. Protests followed across Baltimore, escalating into riots, and buildings burned in the same neighbourhoods where Alexis grew up. She wrote the lyrics that year. The music would take much longer.
“The challenge was that I wasn’t a strong enough musician yet to make this the song that it needed to be,” Alexis says. It took years of study and growth, and years of watching the news deliver new versions of the same story, headline after headline. When she finally pulled the song back out of the archive, she understood it had grown far beyond one name. It had become a question for everyone.
The final arrangement arrived by accident. The band was improvising in rehearsal, the sound growing loud and chaotic, when Alexis stopped everyone. In the silence, her drummer’s throne let out a faint squeak as he shifted his weight, a sound she compared to a broken sign barely clinging to its hinges, ready to crash in the smallest breeze. It sent her straight back to the riots. Within days, she rebuilt the song from scratch. The first half is anger, riot, loss and frustration. The second half rests on her belief that communities can heal, that burned buildings can be rebuilt and that something worth hearing can rise from destruction.
One final piece bridged the two halves. After hearing Brass Against’s “Nobody Speak/Bullet In Your Head,” Alexis knew exactly what the song needed: a lot more brass. She had never arranged for more than five horns before, and five wasn’t going to cut it. She teamed up with William Haubrich of the South African College of Music, and together they built and recorded a 15-piece horn section in Cape Town, the sound that finally completed the song.
MASHA. and the Fam formed in a converted refrigerator in the basement of a door factory. The collective is built around Alexis’s keys and voice and plays cinematic alt rock that Record World International has called a “cinematic opus.” Their vibrant, deliciously theatrical live shows are built to leave audiences seeing the world a little differently. The current lineup features Alexis on lead vocals and keys, Pedro Aquino on guitar, Servio Maldonado on bass and Kyle Dombroski on drums, with a rotating cast of collaborators filling out the collective.
It started with one name in Baltimore. Nine years and countless headlines later, “New Normal” hands the question to all of us: how long are we going to put up with it?
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