Damon McMahon’s Amen Dunes project is coming to an end. He has released a final album, Death Jokes II, today, stripping back songs from recent album Death Jokes with producer Craig Silvey. Check it out below, via Sub Pop.
“This is the last chapter of the final volume,” McMahon said in press materials. “Goodbye, I’ve barely said a word to you, but it’s always like that at parties—we never really see each other, we never say the things we should like to; in fact it’s the same everywhere in this life. Let’s hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged.”
McMahon founded Amen Dunes in 2006, releasing an album of 8-track recordings, D.I.A., that set his instincts as a pop tunesmith to a chilly, alienated production style borne of its creation in a cabin in the Catskills. His status rose after signing to Sacred Bones, the goth-leaning Brooklyn label of which he became a lodestar.
He released a string of cult favorites for the label, starting with Through Donkey Jaw before 2014’s Love—a daydreamy indie-pop album featuring members of Iceage and Godspeed You! Black Emperor—and Freedom, the record that crystallized McMahon’s songwriting and elevated Amen Dunes beyond its origins as a reliquary of underground curios. He signed to Sub Pop and, this March, released his four-years-in-the-making swan song, Death Jokes, an album that expanded the Amen Dunes style to incorporate the sounds of his beloved electronic and hip-hop music. The remix record features additional contributions from Panoram, Kwake Bass, Christoffer Berg, and Robbie Lee.
“Death Jokes was about more than I can summarize,” McMahon said to Pitchfork. “The most I can say is the songs have little to do with actual death, and more about the death of your insides.”
