Liars Unveil New LP Born From a Michigan Pollution Fight

Liars have announced their eleventh studio album, A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans, out 5 March on Mute, and shared its first track, “Ice Pick, Kalamazoo.”

Formed in New York more than two decades ago and now led solely by Angus Andrew, Liars have rarely made the same record twice, moving from the dance-punk of their debut through the reworked percussion of Drums Not Dead and the solo reinvention of TFCF to the expansive collaborations of The Apple Drop. A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans continues that pattern of change, though this time the shift comes from where Andrew has been living rather than how the band records.

The album grew out of Andrew’s time in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he moved with his wife and daughter. Shortly after arriving, he noticed a persistent odor around the family’s home and his daughter’s school: toxic hydrogen sulfide, among other pollutants, released by a nearby packaging factory at levels high enough that the state health department told residents to stay indoors. Andrew was drawn into a long campaign to hold the factory accountable, and he carried the frustration of that fight into the record. “You become so used to something, you lose your sense of it,” he says in press materials for the album.

The album’s title comes from an actual Michigan law that prohibits local governments from banning single use plastic bags, a piece of bureaucratic logic Andrew found himself returning to throughout the writing process. Written and recorded between the United States and Australia, where Andrew now lives, the record reunited him with drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell, both collaborators on The Apple Drop.

The result is political in a different way than protest music usually is: less concerned with a single cause than with what it costs a person to keep fighting. “It wasn’t just the environment that was polluted,” Andrew says. “It was also my mind.”

A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans will be released on white recycled and recyclable PET vinyl, CD, and digitally, and runs to eleven tracks. Liars will support it with their first UK and European tour in close to a decade, including a one-off twentieth anniversary performance of Drums Not Dead. Watch the video for “Ice Pick, Kalamazoo,” out now.