Merge Records is thrilled to announce the signing of Tanner York! Emerging from the power pop underground in 2025 with his debut album Welcome to the Shower, York’s music is sweet and psyched out, full of Big Star Bravado and Brian Wilson’s bittersweet bliss. The announcement of his signing comes in the midst of a flurry of tour dates, including opening sets for Sylvan Esso and fellow Merge artists The Tubs, but if you can’t make it to a show, Welcome to the Shower will soon be available to spin on your home audio system, as Merge Records is reissuing it on CD and limited-edition opaque “Baby Bloo” Peak Vinyl. Welcome to the Shower arrives on February 26, 2027, and features the previously unreleased track “Dumbest Person Alive.” Listen to Welcome to the Shower wherever you stream music, and reserve your copy via the US or UK Merge store or Tanner's Bandcamp page!

Made in a short frenzy while studying music tech at UNC Asheville, Welcome to the Shower was, according to York, the product of his getting “pretty obsessed with recording on 8-track cassette recorders, along with the idea of the ‘perfect pop song.’” 

Tanner York on Welcome to the Shower:

I don’t know if I achieved that anywhere on here, but this crop of bite-sized songs has remained very near and dear to my heart. Most of the music I was listening to at the time was home-recorded in a very obvious and proud way. I loved the idea of basking in the limitations, and I became infatuated with small-sounding music. 

Like many of the hallmarks of the small-sounding music York found himself in pursuit of, Welcome to the Shower plays huge. It’s a hooky, kaleidoscopic vision of the pop canon that ranges far further afield than the little rooms York composed and recorded it in. On vinyl, at full volume, what surfaces is how physical that process was. Once the idea of calling the album Welcome to the Shower came to York in a dream, he wrote the title track “to allow the title to make sense.” To make the song, he had to lug his 8-track to the bathroom and figure out how to mic a running shower, singing the vocals into another microphone while sitting on the floor on the other side of the door. The tape manipulation that turns “Baby Bloo” on its ear was achieved by York’s jiggling the cassette with one hand while changing the speed on a delay pedal with another. 

“It’s fun to make a record on equipment you don’t know how to use,” says York. “Impedances get mismatched, effects get routed wrong … what was once sweet and earnest becomes surreal and silly.” On Welcome to the Shower, there is no border between the sweet, the earnest, the surreal, and the silly, its 12 songs blossoming into an endlessly-inviting sonic dreamscape. Tanner York is its architect, proudly wearing a bleeding heart on his sleeve. You leave it hungry, not just for what next spools out from York’s 8-track recorder, but to experience Welcome to the Shower again and again and again, each spin as fresh as the first.

Tanner York on tour: 
Sep 29 Asheville, NC – Static Age
Sep 30 Atlanta, GA – Aisle 5
Oct 01 Chattanooga, TN – Cherry Street Tavern
Oct 03 Asheville, NC – The Orange Peel ^
Nov 03 Austin, TX – The 13th Floor *
Nov 04 Denton, TX – Rubber Gloves *
Nov 06 Atlanta, GA – The Earl *
Nov 08 Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle Backroom *

^ w/ Sylvan Esso
* w/ The Tubs