Love Axe Shares "Blue Skies Above" Ahead LP Optimism Paranoia Desperation Abolition

"Before Nixon and Reagan broke unions and pushed a conservative agenda that’s now in full bloom, the rallying cries against social injustice were sung by folk singers; Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and more were pro-union, anti-war, anti-fascist, and pro-civil rights. Their weapons of choice were often an acoustic guitar, 3 chords, and the truth.

It’s in this intersection of quiet and rage that we also find producer and genre-melting songwriter Christopher Hatfield on the fifth Love Axe album, Optimism Paranoia Desperation Abolition.

If you’re familiar with Love Axe (sometimes a band, but primarily Hatfield with contributing guests since 2015), OPDA might strike you as a stylistic left turn; gone are the indie rock and power pop influences that peppered early releases like Phenomenomenons (2011), and South Dakota (2015). The funky, Prince-meets-Weezer (weird, but it worked!) workouts of THE FOOD (2021) and the futuristic synths that dominated the instrumental Linear Valley (2022) are missing, too. In their place is something more intimate: a softly strummed nylon-string guitar and carefully placed adornments (clarinet, piano, pedal steel, some bass and drums here and there) lead the way, making room for Hatfield’s baritone to be front and center, allowing his wary words to wash over listeners with the kind of vulnerability heard on records by Bill Callahan, David Berman, and Nick Drake.

“I wrote this record as a way of processing and grieving all of the terrible things I learned about what humanity and this country are capable of during the first Trump administration. And I could only really do that because it was over with - I don’t think you’re really able to process trauma and grief without the benefit of time or psychological distance,” Hatifield said.

But it’s 2025, and here we are, once again, in the clutches of fascist billionaires, hellbent on revenge and destroying the planet. Hatifeld continues, “So this now feels, very sadly, much more relevant to our world than it did when I finished it.”

It’s been said, however, that bad times can help inspire great art - and that’s the focus of OPDA. Through nine songs, Hatfield takes us on a considered, long walk through the aforementioned grieving process, attempting to understand how we got here in the first place and how to make the best of it while we’re all still breathing (despite the anxiety and depression lurking over our heads like a dark cloud on the reg). OPDA is a record that is delivered in four parts: quite literally, it considers the trajectory from optimism to paranoia to desperation to abolition, all set to a soundtrack in which fans of Will Oldham, Wilco, and the solo work of Sunny Day Real Estate’s Jeremy Enigk will find comfort."