Credit: Eleanor Petry

Ezra Furman announces new album ‘Goodbye Small Head’

Thu 13 February 2025 14:21, UK

Ezra Furman has announced details of her new album, Goodbye Small Head, set for release on May 16th through Bella Union.

To preview the record, Furman has provided the first taste of the LP by sharing the new single ‘Grand Mall’, which arrives accompanied by a music video directed by Eleanor Petry. Additionally, Furman has announced plans to tour the United Kingdom in May, including a specially curated event at Earth Hackney on May 18th.

For the new album, Furman has self-penned a press release. She writes, “Goodbye Small Head is the name of this record. Twelve songs, twelve variations on the experience of completely losing control, whether by weakness, illness, mysticism, BDSM, drugs, heartbreak or just living in a sick society with one’s eyes open. These songs are vivid with overwhelm.”

Furman continued: “They’re not about someone going off the rails, they are inside that person’s heart. The songwriting here is a revision to William Wordsworth’s famous proclamation that ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ I can agree with that, except for the tranquillity part. This poetry, my poetry, arrived in the midst of the storm. It was written as I teetered toward the edge. (I did the edits once I was safe again.)”

The record was made in Chicago with the assistance of producer Brian Deck who previously helmed Furman’s early albums, Banging Down the Doors and Inside the Human Body. On reuniting with Deck, Furman said, “In some way I think I was trying to return to a much younger mindset, when all the intensity and fear and emotion of life was less mediated by adult coping mechanisms. When it was all brand new with no filter.”

According to Furman, “GSH also reflects a band reaching a new peak of our powers. If I were a music journalist, I would call this an orchestral emo prog-rock record sprinkled with samples. Thank goodness I’m not a music journalist! I think of this music as cinematic and intense.”

She adds: “Other than that, this record features something that’s become nearly an anachronism: a band that’s been playing real instruments together for over a decade, intuitively in touch with each other as musicians. Four players in a room together who know exactly how to respond to one another.”

In addition to touring the United Kingdom in May, Furman is also set to play an extended run of dates across North America which begins in July and concludes in October.