PILLAR OF NA | VINYL RECORD (LP)

Vinyl LP pressing. Saintseneca's Zac Little has been thinking a lot about memory. Not necessarily his memories, though they creep in often, too. Rather, he mulls over the idea of memory itself: it's resilience, it's haziness, how it slips away as we try to hang on, the way it resurfaces despite our best efforts to forget. Memory is the common thread running throughout the Columbus, OH folk-punk band's fourth album, Pillar of Na, arriving in late summer via ANTIRecords. Following 2015's critically lauded Such Things, the new album's name is rooted in remembrance, referencing the Genesis story of Lot's wife who looks back at a burning Sodom after God instructs her not to. She looks back, and God turns her into a pillar of salt. "Na," meanwhile, is the chemical symbol for sodium. "Nah" is a passive refusal and the universal song word. It means nothing and stands for nothing. It is "as it is." Musically, Pillar of Na is Saintseneca's most ambitious album to date, with Little aiming to incorporate genre elements he'd rarely heard in folk. "I wanted to use the idiom of folk-rock, or whatever you want to call it, and to try to do something that had never been done before," Little explains. I told Mike Mogis I wanted Violent Femmes meets the new Blade Runner soundtrack. I'm looking for the intersection between Kendrick Lamar and The Fairport Convention."