THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Surviving The Dream is Fidlar’s long-awaited fourth studio LP and first in over five years.
Self-produced and self-recorded at Balboa Recording Studio in East L.A., Surviving The Dream is many things for the Southern California trio of Zac Carper, Max Kuehn and Brandon Schwartzel. An embrace of their DIY roots. A reaction to the youthful kinetic energy packed into rooms at their recent live shows. A reckoning with aging and evolving.
Finding themselves faced with existential downtime several years ago — brought on by a planned hiatus that was incidentally prolonged by the pandemic — Fidlar (an acronym for Fuck It Dawg, Life’s A Risk) returned feeling an odd discombobulation. In some ways everything was the same; and in others, everything was completely different.
As a band whose identity has forever been tethered to getting fucked up, their attitude toward it has changed. Partly that’s because they’re older now, and partly because Carper was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder; something that has helped him make sense of how he acted and felt at certain times in the past, especially when making music.
As a whole, they’ve grown up; no longer the young, hedonistic youths they’d been when they started out. And yet, their live shows have felt more feral than ever, with young audiences energized and full of the very reckless abandon Fidlar stoked in their early days. It’s this burning spirit that drives Surviving The Dream: The debauchery, the feelings of angst, the carefree viewpoints, and the questions of belonging that are not, and never have been bound by age. Fucked up, reckless, fun-loving and wild, the record is both a reminiscence of their beginnings and a testament to what they’ve become.”
