SAM GENDEL ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM ADVANCED WHITE TRASH, SHARES GLITCHY ‘PATTERN DANCE’

Sam Gendel is leaving the saxophone at the door.

The wildly prolific American musician has announced his new album Advanced White Trash, due November 6, and shared its restless lead single ‘Pattern Dance’ — a maximalist collision of glitch, rap, R&B and deconstructed hyperpop.

“People think of me as a saxophonist, and I get that,” Gendel says. “But a large portion of my music has nothing to do with that instrument.”

Advanced White Trash makes that point pretty convincingly. Across nine tracks, Gendel swaps jazz conventions for warped beats, processed vocals, strange hooks and electronic textures, pushing his songwriting further into view without losing the improvisational instinct that has defined his work.

‘Pattern Dance’ is the clearest indication of where he’s heading. Hyperactive and heavily processed, it sounds like Gendel has taken pop music apart and rebuilt it with the pieces in the wrong order — restless, weird and unexpectedly catchy.

It’s a sharp turn, but hardly an entirely unexpected one from an artist who has released 11 solo albums since 2017 and worked with an absurdly broad cast of musicians, including Ry Cooder, Louis Cole, Pino Palladino, Blake Mills, Sam Wilkes, Fabiano do Nascimento and Mach-Hommy.

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Gendel’s influences here are just as eclectic. He cites everything from Rolling Loud performance videos and celebrity product pitches to the endless stream of online cultural content he consumes.

“I can't imagine just consuming it without somewhere for it to go,” he says. “That would feel like the most insane mental constipation.”

So he put it somewhere.

The album title came from a friend who described the music as sounding like Gendel had “tried to synthesise Coca Cola in my garage” and dubbed the result “advanced white trash”. Gendel evidently liked the description enough to make it official.

Musically, the record refuses to sit still. ‘Final Fantasy’ moves from icy atmosphere and whispered vocals into a beat-heavy melodic passage; ‘Swan’ rides a psychedelic Memphis-inspired groove; ‘Beanbag’ heads towards alternative R&B; while ‘Snap That Chain’ delivers the album’s biggest pop hook before veering into typically off-kilter instrumental territory.

There’s an appropriately chaotic story behind the vocals, too. Gendel originally recorded all the instrumentation first, improvising the arrangements in real time. Six months later, he returned to add vocals — only to abandon the lyrics he had painstakingly recovered after losing his phone down a storm drain in Japan.

Instead, he improvised every lyric while recording.

The result is an album that sounds deliberately loose but never careless: strange, melodic, digitally warped and constantly moving.

Advanced White Trash arrives November 6.