Sometimes I have a longing for the year ’98.
And looking at today things have changed in every way.
I want to time travel into a future where we’ll all be safe from the acid rain.
And the government will speak for me, like it should have so many years ago.
New York City’s Mothra Stewart is the brainchild of noise pop musician, songwriter, and founder of Green Witch Recordings, Marc LeFebvre. Mothra Stewart’s brand of lo-fi, gazey, bedroom pop, soaked in fuzz, reverb, and delay culminates in their first LP, We Laugh in the Mouth of the Graveyard. The first single from the album, Vintage Futurism, has tinges of Modest Mouse, Flaming Lips, and Elliott Smith’s first LP.
Vintage Futurism is at once dreamy and full of rage, a lamentation wrapped in the swaddling cloth of shoegaze; an angry, frightened and unrelenting environmental protest song in clever disguise. The accompanying video clip, directed by Preston Spurlock, is an undistilled, lysergic nightmare, clipped from a low-frequency subconscious rabbit hole.
The track, a collaboration with Teen Idle’s Sara Abdelarry, is a dream. “Sara and I decided to collaborate right as the world was shutting down due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” Stewart recalls. “I remember sitting in my apartment in Manhattan and picking tracks that I was stuck on to send to her. She has an uncanny ability to find the vocal melody, and her sound is so reminiscent of Mazzy Star and Wolf Alice. I personally think this track has a Soft Bulletin-era Flaming Lips feel, and the combination of her lo-fi, bedroom shoegaze vocals gave the track a mood that I feel is both nostalgic and original.”
“Marc and I had been toying around with the idea of collaborating and I really just missed playing and working on music with people,” Abdelberry adds. “He sent me a couple of instrumentals and said he wasn’t sure where to go vocally with them, so I tried to play around and the melody came pretty randomly and quickly. To be honest, the vocals on “Vintage Futurism” are in such a low range because I planned for Marc to sing them, but then when we spoke, he told me to leave my demo vocals and that’s how everything unfolded. I don’t know where the lyrics came from, but they ended up being about the ideal world I want to live in in the future.”
After relocating to New York from Austin, TX, LeFebvre took the moniker as a creative vehicle to write, record, and release his music via the quickly growing indie label. has led the artist to tour, release records on vinyl and cassette, perform on television and radio, and even showcase as an official artist at festivals like South By Southwest.
Vintage Futurism, and We Laugh In The Mouth Of The Graveyard, is available everywhere this summer through Green Witch Recordings.
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