Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

New Fragility

New Fragility is emotionally fraught but musically generous, as the frontman finds ever new ways to put his gangly songs across.

While one can certainly hear touchstones echoed throughout New Fragility, it has the singularity and focus of one artistic voice.

No longer buoyed by adolescent concerns, Alec Ounsworth may not be in the happiest of states. But if you heed closely you’ll hear the sound of one man’s combing for moral redemption amidst societal and individual collapse. And that deserves applause.

New Fragility parses trauma, both his own and the more general effects of late capitalism and the ongoing collapse of American democracy.

Alec Ounsworth lets go of expectations and writes for himself, and the result is arguably his best album in years.

Ounsworth’s latest album, named after a David Foster Wallace story, finds him examining the state of the USA as well as looking within.

Alec Ounsworth’s latest album is a world of divorce, substance abuse, callous indifference to murder, and also bittersweet nostalgia for that bygone indie-rock era that gave him a platform in the first place.

Overall, New Fragility is a downer and not a perfect release by any stretch, but it does fragment the customary expectations saddled with a new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album and builds up a better framework for Ounsworth in its place.

New Fragility is an easy album to dismiss, especially when it’s such low-stakes (old band, low-key release), but it’s even easier to just enjoy it for what it is.

Following a series of patchy releases, ‘New Fragility’ strives for structure, toggling between social awareness and slack harmonies in an interplay that never fully attains the unity it craves.

New Fragility generally feels like an album Ounsworth needed to make, rather than other needed to hear.