Exclusive Song Premiere: ‘Automatic,’ The Frail

ABOVE: THE FRAIL. PHOTO COURTESY OF BRITTANY TILLEMAN

Progressing from a meager Craigslist collaboration to a dynamic duo, over the past four years vocalist Daniel Lannon and producer Kevin Durr have become known as The Frail. For their first three EPs, Lannon and Durr wrote songs via email correspondence, which resulted in sounds ranging from falsetto homage to Michael Jackson to electronic melodies akin to the Postal Service. For their upcoming debut full-length album, LoveDeathLegend, however, the process changed and the band’s synth-pop is more streamlined.

“We came at the writing process in a way that was completely new to us,” Lannon says. “At Fur Trade [where we recorded] we had the entire band and guest musicians come in, push record and play for hours.”

For this album, which will drop August 26, the duo worked backward. After a few months of recording half-songs, full songs, and everything in between, they felt there was enough material to create an album. “We essentially wrote the album live and then took it into the recording studio and flipped things upside down,” Lannon explains.

Here, we are pleased to premiere “Automatic,” a love song in the most toxic manner. “The song was written about a certain experience where trust just wasn’t there, no matter how hard we tried to make it happen,” Lannon says. “It’s about wanting something to work out but knowing it would be toxic to continue.”

LOVEDEATHLEGEND IS OUT AUGUST 26 ON KOBALT. PREORDER IT HERE. FOR MORE ON THE FRAIL, PLEASE VISIT THE DUO’S FACEBOOK PAGE.