For fans of: Mutual Benefit, Why?, Florist, The Postal Service, The Moldy Peaches.

LP on limited Baby Blue vinyl. As Pickle Darling, Christchurch, New Zealand-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Lukas Mayo (they/them) zooms in on the universality of existential thought with earnest playfulness. After years of touring on previous albums, Bigness (2019, Z Tapes) and Cosmonaut (2021, Z Tapes) and supporting artists like Lucy Dacus and The Beths, Pickle Darling’s third album, Laundromat, marks their debut with Father/Daughter Records. Laundromat !nds magic in the mundane, pointing past perfectionism and instead leans into the art of the everyday. Art is everywhere: in the shape we make out of a napkin while waiting for our co”ee to arrive, in the text we send to a friend in need, in the beat we make on the steering wheel while stuck at a red light. Laundromat was created in what Mayo describes as their first stable living situation, away from difficult flatmates, tense surroundings, and abysmal landlords. As an artist who writes, records, and produces all of their music at home, the security of their current place allowed their ideas to blossom. Writing soon became a daily practice, and rather than laboring over each song like they had previously some songs on previous records were months and months in the making Mayo found themselves drawn to the spark of what had created the initial idea in the !rst place. Mayo highlights folk artists Connie Converse, Bill Fay, and Vashti Bunyan as passengers in the process of Laundromat; artists who put music into the world then disappeared from the public eye. “I wanted to capture the feeling of making music that’s out of step with everything around it,” they explain. “I wanted it to be a lot more immediate.” Mayo recorded a lot of Laundromat’s ideas onto their phone, giving themselves permission to allow those ideas to be the entire song. The enforced length of what a song should be a neat, 3-minute sellable product has always bothered Mayo, and while some of the songs on Laundromat do !t around that particular mold, Pickle Darling says the smaller pockets on the album were them striving to create their “own kind of normal.

” “A just reward for a musician who’s been on the cusp of a big breakthrough for several years now.” Rolling Stone AU/NZ

“An infectious artist with a bright future ahead.” Ones To Watch

“Their mastery of starry-eyed songcraft recalls mid-’60s Beach Boys or Harry Nilsson: catchy and innocent-feeling, able to create a whole world in a single two-minute track.” Bandcamp Daily

“The very embodiment of the kind of bleeding-heart intimacy that should define bedroom pop convention, but rarely ever does.” – Bandcamp Daily

“Inspired little flashes of magic.” – GoldFlakePaint

“Wholesome… soothing and lyrically beautiful like Lomelda’s or Tomberlin’s ballads.” – Stereogum

“They’ve refined what makes them great, and I imagine that audience is only going to get bigger.” – RNZ’s Tony Stamp