Indie-pop band Superorganism will come to Lucerna Music Bar with new album World Wide Pop.
When the first Superorganism music was uploaded in 2017, the reaction was anything but tepid. The group’s in-your-face aesthetic — a post-everything mishmash of psychedelic indie pop and fizzy, funky electronica — quickly began to resonate; inaugural track “Something For Your M.I.N.D.” was co-signed by Frank Ocean less than a month after it popped up on Soundcloud. Early buzz sent the messageboard rumor mill into hyperdrive, inciting speculation that Superorganism was the conceptual-pop project of an older rock band, or maybe a virtual avatar for some big-name celebrity. Some online skeptics wondered if frontman Orono — the Japanese singer-songwriter who linked with the internationally-based collective’s other members via the internet while matriculating at a New England high school — even existed at all.
By the time their self-titled LP dropped in 2018, though, the consensus was that Superorganism was a real band, comprised of real musicians, with a real knack for crafting idiosyncratic sing-a-longs that feel simultaneously colossal and homemade. In the four years since their debut, Superorganism has toured the globe, interacted face-to-face with several of their musical heroes, and appeared as themselves in an episode of the surreal superhero series Legion.
They also wrote and recorded World Wide Pop, a brand new full-length album, which finds the group (whose current lineup includes Orono, Harry, Tucan, B, and Soul) doubling-down on the collage-like maximalism that made their early efforts so transportive. But World Wide Pop also sees Superorganism pushing their fixations to new extremes, both sonically and emotionally. While their first album was completed before the whole band had ever been in the same room at the same time, the World Wide Pop sessions spilled into the physical realm.
World Wide Pop is a showcase for Superorganism’s newly deepened understanding of each other’s interests and impulses, the kind of creative convergence you’d expect when online friends start spending time together IRL. This synchronicity extended to collaborators too, including veteran producer Stuart Price (Madonna, The Killers), who Superorganism tapped to help them achieve the IMAX-sized sheen that their bedroom recordings have always aspired to. The resulting palette melds millennium-era synth schmaltz with glitchy wild-eyed weirdness, a textural upgrade that never betrays Superorganism’s signature playfulness.
