Handsome Furs—husband and wife duo Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry—founded their sonic caper in 2006. Five years later the pair are seasoned world travelers, obsessed with the Balkans and inspired by Southeast Asia. They’ve performed in oppressed places few Westerners visit—most notably Burma, where they helped a band smuggle an album out of the country for mastering. The band’s third release, Sound Kapital —dark, danceable, electronic music heavy on retro synth—reflects the Handsome Furs’ intercontinentalness. "The thread that ties it all together is that it was all inspired by people outside of North America who we met, and things that we saw on tour traveling," says Boeckner by phone. Shrugging off what he calls obscure metaphor and fictional narrative in indie music, Sound Kapital’s lyrics are stripped down and deal with harsh realities. "These are pretty fucking dire political times, right? Economically, socially, governmentally. There’s a huge divide between rich and poor," he says. "I feel like now is maybe not the best time to retreat into sort of navel-gazing, Look how smart I am, fantasy shit. So when we wrote the lyrics for the record we were like, OK, no fruitiness." Boeckner says the band takes cues from the Clash—the lyrics deal with dissatisfaction, while the music is cathartic and danceable. Join the Handsome Furs for a dead serious dance party in Santa Fe on Tuesday. Find out more here.
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