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Bleached Announce New Can You Deal? EP and Zine, Share Title Track

Los Angeles garage-pop quartet Bleached have announced a new EP, Can You Deal?, out March 3 via Dead Oceans. They’ve also shared the title track, a defiant, jittery anthem that sounds best at max volume:

The new EP is accompanied by a zine, also called Can You Deal?, that includes essays, poetry, lyrics, and art from members of Bleached and a bunch of other musicians: Liz Phair, Kate Nash, Lizzo, Hayley Williams, Julien Baker, Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis, Tegan and Sara‘s Tegan Quin, White Lung‘s Mish Way, Hole’s Patty Schemel, and more. The zine is available for $10; net proceeds benefit Planned Parenthood.

Bleached’s previous album was Welcome the Worms, released in April 2016. The Can You Deal? project was inspired by frustration at being labeled a “girl band” during the Welcomes the Worms press cycle, as Bleached’s Jennifer Clavin writes:

I create music and art because I need to. To express, to bond, to reconcile, and to connect. And to use my voice. To have it received with such a generic labeling as “girl band” and consistently referenced as “female fronted” is insulting and reductive.  The title track to this EP, “Can You Deal?” is about this experience. Last year we released a deeply personal full length album titled Welcome the Worms. It was a record about being in an emotionally abusive relationship. It was a record about getting spun out on drugs and alcohol. It was a record about totally losing myself in order to find myself. It was also our most ambitious body of work yet, with guitar work and guitar sounds and production we had only dreamed of until then. And yet to this day I am still fielding interview questions that have more to do with my gender than with the art I am creating. Somehow the conversation usually derails into some variation of the following question: “What is it like to be a girl in a rock band?” And the ensuing story will define us based on our sex. Why is gender pointed out in nearly all coverage of our band? Labeling me as a woman in a band just puts me in a box, and doesn’t allow everything else I am to be seen and heard. It’s 2017, Can You Deal with women playing rock and roll yet?

Bleached will tour with the Damned in April, and they’re also performing at New York City’s Panorama Music Festival. Find the album art and track list for Can You Deal? below.

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