With Speed Queen being released a little over a month from today, Montreal’s Little Scream is sharing another slice from the forthcoming album. “Disco Ball” follows earlier singles “Dear Leader” and “Still Life” and arrives alongside a short story of kismet that resulted in the song and album’s creation—one involving a Flying V guitar, an antique store in the American heartland, and creating hope out of feelings of hopelessness. Click play below and read on!

In late summer of 2017, I was driving to the Chicago Midway airport after a visit to my family in Galena, Illinois. The sky was ripe with colored clouds. Everything began to vibrate, and I felt a steady flow of ideas working their way into melodies. I made a U-turn on the single-lane highway; I had just passed an antique mall in Elizabeth, Illinois. I vowed to myself that if they had a guitar, I would buy it. There on the second floor next to Oktoberfest beer steins and a Victorian needlepoint cushion sat a white Flying V guitar. It was covered in grey logos for UV Vodka and looked like it had languished in someone’s basement bedroom after a few failed attempts at “Smoke on the Water.” I talked them down to $150. I canceled my flight in the parking lot then drove to the nearest quiet road I could find. I sat in a small clearing near the Apple River and began to write this album.

“Disco Ball” is one of the songs that was born musically on the country road after I bought the Flying V guitar. It incorporates many of the observations from being on the road with the last album, feeling a sense of recognition in the down-and-outness of the places we visited. Identifying with that sense of having been duped for following your dreams in every closed shop window we passed. Thinking about how that book The Secret must be responsible for a countable percentage of the subprime mortgage crisis. Thinking about struggling as a musician, but having that be the thing that allows me to make a disco ball out of all the smashed mirrors of my past. Taking all of this and thinking about how to make an anthem of hope for times when you feel you have nothing.

Speed Queen arrives October 25 on Merge Records (Dine Alone Records in Canada). Pre-order today on CD (housed in a hand-assembled, glue- and plastic-free case) and limited-edition gold marble Peak Vinyl.