Andrew W.K. has dropped a new song, “Stay True to Your Heart,” which will appear on his new album, God Is Partying, out September 10th via Napalm Records.
“Stay True to Your Heart” boasts a brooding core, with W.K. letting his gravely voice sail over pulsing synths and steady drums. But the song’s subdued verses properly explode into a mighty chorus as W.K. taps into his falsetto against a wall of guitars.
In an email to Rolling Stone, W.K. described “Stay True to Your Heart” as “a love song about partying, but only to an extent, and not in a very meaningful way. We can also say the chord changes are the water, the drums are like blood, the vocals are hopefully like air and water. Still, these are only clunky attempts to place an overlay astride the infinitely nuanced experience of partying — a nice way to give ourselves tidy answers.”
The priest of partying continued: “An incomplete view of partying actually clarifies and explains and organizes some aspects of life, but it also blurs and obscures others, usually without us noticing. Nearly any overarching point of view can be applied to partying, but it doesn’t necessarily help in comprehending our personal situations beyond the comforting limitations inherent to any particular worldview. Everything is partying when it comes from your heart. And even this is just another inadequate worldview. It takes a lot of rigorous skepticism to realize all our perspectives and explanations about life have short comings. It’s an ultimately empowering, albeit initially bleak, realization.”
“Stay True to Your Heart” is the fourth offering off God Is Partying, following “I’m in Heaven,” “Babalon” and “Everybody Sins.” The record will follow W.K.’s 2018 album, You’re Not Alone.
W.K. offered some additional insight into the album’s themes and the circumstances that inspired the songs on the new record, saying, “Like most people, I suppose I’ve had some ups and downs. But I’ve usually just focused on the ups. I mean, I’ve had such an insanely lucky life. I’ve wasted a lot of that good luck and I feel very distraught about that. I mean, when I was younger I definitely had some dark run-ins with stuff, but I guess maybe we kind of used those run-ins as a reverse sort of psychological rocket fuel to get cheered-up with this kind of rock music. In one way, it’s just like being in a non-stop trance. It doesn’t feel exactly like a dream dying, but more like a dream turning from a uniting fantasy into an alienating nightmare.”
From Rolling Stone US