Freezepop's New Album!

Happy Kickstart-iversary?
almost 4 years ago – Thu, May 28, 2020 at 07:21:54 AM

Hello all, hope you've been keeping safe/healthy/relatively sane! We are generally all of those. Hanging in there! So then, how about a status report? The mixes have been sent off for mastering. This is, sadly, taking a bit longer than anticipated (which, given this entire campaign, I suppose is not hugely surprising). But our mastering guy is very busy, and some of the mixes ended up needing further tweaking. So yeah, that is out of our hands for a little bit. But we're making a lot of progress elsewhere:

• Sean is upstairs in the studio this very minute, working on some hott remixes.

• I've been working on all the CD and vinyl artwork! Very close to being done with that. Wanna have a peek?

• Christmas and I are working on the new website!

• Bananas is working on our new video! (And another video is in the planning stages.)

• I've been talking to our various remixers and sorting that all out for the bonus album.

• Yesterday we had a photoshoot! Let me tell you, the social distancing thing made for some tricky planning (we're being pretty careful about things) it seemed like the best option to do something DIY and outside. I'm a lil scared to see how the photos actually turned out, ha ha. But either way... it was SO NICE to see people again! I have missed these wonderful folks.

(Don't worry, this isn't one of the official pictures.)

Anyway, that's pretty much what we've been up to... more soon!

Hello, and updates
about 4 years ago – Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 02:34:02 AM

Hi, all! Hope you are hanging in there. We are relatively "OK," all things considered. We've been hunkering down for a couple of weeks now, even doing some remote band meetings:

Buuuut yeah, life is WEIRD and SCARY lately. I'm very lucky in that I can work from home. I'm still chipping away at the album art, but TBH it's hard to stay focused right now! We're getting there, though. Final mixes are still being tweaked and lived-with. Baby steps, I guess.

AND ALSO, LOGISTICAL STUFF

I wanted to update you on some logistics because it has created a bit of confusion... as I mentioned in the last update, I locked down the Backerkit surveys so I could finalize the credit info for the album artwork. This then triggered the next step in the process, for Backerkit to charge people's credit cards. A few notes:

• This is a separate charge from Kickstarter pledges. If you only pledged on Kickstarter, this is all irrelevant to you and you can skip over this whole explanation. Backerkit charges are for any add-ons or upgrades that were placed after the Kickstarter ended.
• Backerkit doesn't charge cards immediately when somebody orders something...  in our case, where our album has ended up taking wayyyy longer than we expected, this has caused some confusion when people thought they had already paid a couple of years ago.
• Since I closed out the surveys, obviously a lot Terrible World Events have happened, making this a bad/financially unstable time for a lot of people. If you need to cancel your Backerkit charges, please email me at [email protected] and we'll sort it out.
• Also, if you're getting notifications from Backerkit about needing to update your credit card, this is legit and not a scam.

Sorry this whole thing is so convoluted! If you need any other technical help or can't access your surveys or anything, email me, [email protected].

Anyway, until next time... stay well <3

Liz E.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END
about 4 years ago – Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 01:25:51 AM

Exciting times here… last night we had a band meeting and LISTENED TO THE ALBUM!

Well, the 99.3% complete version of the album, anyway. It was basically a “hey, what extremely minor mix tweaks need to happen” listening session. There’s still one song that needs a little more medium tweaking. But it is so close, and it was really cool to hear all that Sean has been doing, because we hadn’t really heard it since the rough mixes, and it's changed a lot since then.

And then we talked about the track listing, and came up with a pretty good consensus on track order. It’s looking like the digital version will have 2 more songs than the vinyl version (vinyl is pretty limited in terms of how much you can physically fit onto it). We struggled with a little, but figured that everyone who gets the vinyl will also get the download, and it seemed to be a better option than bouncing the overflow onto the bonus disc (since the bonus disc is already pretty jam-packed).

So what next?

Well, Sean will be doing the final mixing tweaks. Then we’ll send it off to get mastered. (By the same guy who has done our entire back catalog.) Meanwhile, now that we have the track listing, I can finish the cover art, liner notes, etc. I will also be closing out our backer surveys in the next couple of weeks, so expect an email reminder about that pretty soon… most people won’t need to do anything, but if you want to update your mailing address, change a shirt size, modify your order, etc… this will be your chance to do it.

Thanks again so much for allll your patience up to this point, we are so excited to put this out into the world very soon.

Happy new year (and a bit of what we've been up to)
over 4 years ago – Wed, Jan 01, 2020 at 10:00:29 PM

Hi, y'all, hope your holidays were fantastic! We had some nice times around these parts. And as far as updates go, ohhh boy, we are pretty darn close to being done. Seany has completed his first pass at all the mixes for the main album. Next up comes some revisiting/tweaking and then we'll all have a listen to where things are at and actually commit to the final track listing. THEN it gets mastered (and mayyybe tweaked a bit more during that whole process). 

Boring logistics: I'll be closing out the Backerkit surveys in the coming weeks so that I can have all the credit info for the liner notes locked down, so be on the lookout for that, you'll get a notification email when that happens.

Here's some more info from Seany: 

It's been a really interesting month or two doing the mixes. A lot has changed but its still pretty recognizable as the thing we were working on earlier in the year (with the exception of a very late addition song). I've said it 100 times at this point, but I think it was worth the wait, and I think you will too. Obviously in the end y'all will be the judges of that.

One interesting outcome here that we have a boatload of material. Like, hundreds of songs. We only produced about 50 of them,  but we wrote a lot of stuff and put many things aside for other future projects that we've been planning. So now we're future-proof! At least for a few years. Thank you. We're actually working on an *additional* free bonus thing for people who invested in the Kickstarter to thank you for your patience (just a weird fun extra thing but it should be kind of cool/funny/fun).

We also just shot a video which was shot by our newest sometimes-percussionist I. Screamface and is being edited by Robert John "Bananas" Foster right now with another video (or 2?) being developed concurrently. We hope you get to see the first stuff in the next 6-8 weeks.

Here's looking at 2020 (and 2021, and 2022!). We have a lot of work to do, a lot of ground to cover, and lot of traveling to do in the next couple of years. If you're headed to PAX South we'll see you in San Antonio!

I love you all, f'realsies,

-Sean (Drinkwater from Freezepop, the band)

And we'll leave you with a photo of our festivities from last night (Sean actually did join Bananas later that night at a second location but we didn't get pix of that, so just enjoy Bananas' disembodied head shining pure love on us instead.)

xoxo

Updates, finally
over 4 years ago – Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 12:05:52 AM

Hi y’all. Sorry it’s taken me forever to update, but I wanted there to be actual progress/good news (and we had to wait a little while for that). But! Finally we do have some good news, after weeks of rearranging and setting up the new improved studio and weeks of general Don Music-ing, Sean finally made some breakthroughs, and lo and behold:

So that's pretty well underway. (Sean has been away for a couple of days, and today received some fancy new synth that was supposed to arrive in August but has been delayed/held up in customs for quite some time, so I guess that'll need to make its way up to the studio as well.)

Last week, I recorded vocals for what is likely going to be the last new song for the album. (This is something we’ve done in the past when the album is missing kind of that last piece of the jigsaw puzzle and we get a little last-minute inspiration. “Frontload” on FFFP was like that.)

Other than all that, we're keeping busy planning for some video shoots too! Annnnnd, a couple of shows to announce!

• Saturday, Dec 21, we are playing a fun/weird set of rarities, B-sides, and covers, alongside a bunch of our friends/former roommates/former labelmates: Concerns & Co., Lovesick, Vis Invis Electrique!, and Young Southpaw. It’s a benefit for the Pine Street Inn and is at Union Tavern (formerly PA’s Lounge) in Somerville MA. I know it’s a tough weekend with the holidays and whatnot, but if you’re in town and wanna hear some weird stuff, this show is for you!

• ANNNNND we are going back to PAX South!! January 17-19 in San Antonio. Very excited for this, not least of all because we get to get out of Boston in January. We’re trying to set up a couple of other shows in Texas while we’re down there, so stay tuned.