Sex Week Announce ‘Upper Mezzanine’ EP

Today, Sex Week announce their new EP, Upper Mezzanine, due August 1st on Grand Jury, with a cinematic video for its boisterous and daring new single “Coach,” a song the band said they “wanted to feel like Romanian Popcorn music was playing in an American dive bar.” Hot on the heels of a US tour supporting Chloe Moriondo, the band is also announcing an EP release show in NY and their first ever UK tour dates.

“Coach” follows the release “Coat,” a visceral and sinister EP cut shared earlier this year that The FADER named a Song You Need In Your Life calling it “gloopy and romantic,” saying “it’s a song that twinkles beneath its own indelible murk,” and Stereogum called “dark, viscous, and unhurried.”

“The approach for Upper Mezzanine felt more inquisitive,” says co-vocalist Pearl Amanda Dickson, a relative newcomer to the songwriting world. Sex Week started in 2022 when her now-partner Richard Orofino – a prolific musician & producer since he was in grade school – fell in love with her taste via a wildly eclectic playlist she made for his roommate. Orofino excelled at, as he put it, “honing structural strangeness into something more recognizable.” So Pearl’s precocious perspective and natural appetite for the stranger corners of music was a natural fit. That chemistry led to the whirlwind creation of their eponymous debut EP, which garnered attention and praise from outlets like Rolling Stone, PAPER Magazine, Nylon, Paste Magazine, Consequence and more.

So where the music of their debut felt like momentarily glimpses of something scary and exciting – here things feel far more visceral, each track a focused punch delivered directly from the gut. “I still want people to be singing along and taking the melodies away with them, but the darkness of this EP is obviously there,” says Dickson. “The world is scary right now. I’m scared in lots of ways, and I think that omnipresent feeling definitely snuck into Upper Mezzanine.” 

Part of the band’s charm on Sex Week was how they paired those rough edges with a surprising playfulness, finding a hopeful glow in the gloom and vice versa on nearly every song. “The balance is necessary” says Orofino, “which makes it both conscious and unconscious. We are aware of it as it’s happening but it happens every time.”