Dear Billionaires CD (Gate, Spkg)

Gatefold CD package featuring the album's bold ransom-note-inspired design, with a disc created to resemble a miniature vinyl record. Recorded live at Abbey Road Studio 2 in London, Dear Billionaires captures The Empty Pockets performing together in one of the world's most legendary recording rooms.Built around full-band performances with no instrumental overdubs, the ten-song album preserves the feel, bleed and electricity of four musicians reacting to one another in real time. A vintage Hammond B-2 organ through a Leslie rotary speaker, live ensemble vocals and vintage Telefunken microphones give the record warmth, scale and immediacy.Lead single "Serrated" is a searing blues-rock duet with a surprisingly tender question at it's center: "Would you be the one I could have forever?" Across Dear Billionaires, the Chicago band explores love, freedom, inequality and the search for meaning in a world ordinary people did not build and cannot control. The Empty Pockets' answer is equal parts defiance, humor and human connection: make an absurd joke, fall madly in love, start a revolution, eat some pie and gaze at the conifer trees.