Berlin-based oOoOO & Islamiq Grrrls will release a new collaborative album on Nihjgt Feelings Records, titled Faminine Mystique.

The long-player is an allusion to the Betty Friedan book “Feminine Mystique” that inspired the second wave feminist movement in the US. Friedan said that while society was providing (middle class) women with historically unparalleled material abundance, it failed to allow space for personal growth. A rigid apparatus was keeping women in a narrowly defined social role that all but excluded self-exploration.

Pronounced “Famine in Mystique,” the LP’s name reflects the duo’s feeling that, in a similar way, an increasingly powerful set of contemporary social forces are aligning to, on the one hand, provide people with more music and art than we’ve ever had access to before, yet rigidly limiting the types of music offered to sounds that favor a rigid economics first model of clicks & easy consumption over exploration and experimentation.

We’re told that the 13 songs are “framed by fragments of lost, forgotten, or discredited 20th century artists &and genres”—the well-crafted guitar solos of ’80s metal; jazz guitarist Barney Kessel; the Ashley’s Roachclip drum break; Milli Vanilli; a Kool DJ Red Alert radio show barely audible on some bedside clock radio in some blue-collar town on the outskirts of Manhattan; a freeform saxophone solo over a two-minute, feminist juke-punk anthem.

The first video single, “All of Me”—streaming above—is in part a visual homage of sorts to the Fellini film “Juliet of the Spirits” & Henri-Georges Clouzot’s abandoned, incomplete film “L’enfer.” The video tells the psycho-dramatic story of a woman obsessively chasing after the one she loves, who in return, ignores her to chase another woman. In her disappointment, she enters a state of delusion, incapable of distinguishing her hallucinations from reality. The short film was directed, shot, and edited by Islamiq Grrrls.

In advance of the album’s May 18 release, you can download “Be On Through” via the WeTransfer button below.

Be On Through