THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Waiting. Waiting for futures to be carved out, for missions to be complete, for communities to be solidified, for the security denied to a generation to return. Waiting for the empathic revolution. Waiting for the end of capitalism, and the start of something real and fair. Waiting for spin to die and authenticity to be valued. Waiting for lost loves to return and fumbled relationships to form, for small cracks in families to heal and bigger cracks in inequitable systems to break. You’re in waiting a long time. And then you just have to do it yourself.
In Waiting is Pillow Queens’ debut album, the result of four years of brotherly love in a sisterly unit from Ireland’s most urgent, yearning rock band. Crafted from our lives, and honed in a studio in rural Donegal in the northwest of Ireland, this is a record by queens in waiting and kings in the making.
It’s an album about love; self-love, queer love, the anxiety-inducing faultlines of romantic love, and the love for a city and a country that simultaneously has your back and is on your back. It’s an album about the in-between; the transitional period of an adulthood that never seems to arrive, while you wait for that light-bulb moment when everything makes sense, even though part of you knows deep down it will never come. It’s an album about the purgatorial aspect of late-stage capitalism, where the systems conspire to burden and punish; job insecurity, housing crises, income inequality, and social inequity.
It’s an album about family; chosen, given, received and earned. It’s an album about spirituality; from the ingrained confines of religion, to the expanding borders of spirituality, and the iconography and ritual that populates the emotional interior of anyone who grows up in Ireland. It’s about resilience of the politics of the self and belief in the power of art. The wounded deer leap highest.”
