Tristen & Co. Sweat It Out in ‘Complex’

A few weeks back, incisive songsmith Tristen marked the 10th anniversary of her debut album, Charlatans at the Garden Gate, with a streaming show from The 5 Spot. In the intervening years since Charlatans, she’s taken her time to make each release something special: There’s 2013’s C A V E S and 2017’s Sneaker Waves, and you might count Vanessa Carlton’s 2020 LP Love Is an Art, too, as Tristen and Carlton co-wrote the album. Today, word has come that Tristen will release a new LP called Aquatic Flowers via Mama Bird Recording Co. on June 4.

“When you have a child, you begin to think about, ‘What do I want to tell him? What's important to pass on?’ ” says Tristen in a release. “Stories of love. That's ultimately where art holds its lasting influence and lives on through generations, despite the corruption and violence surrounding it. All we can do is create a message worthy of our ancestors, heroically honest while working on ourselves enough to break the cycle. At the end of the day, we have to look inward.”

The lead single “Complex” reflects the fruits of that labor. It’s an upbeat folk-rock-ish number that looks carefully at how unsettlingly easy it is to get used to unhealthy patterns, simply because they’re familiar. Maybe the devil you know is better to grapple with, but it’s still a devil — destructive and not likely to relinquish control easily.

“It’s a song about wrestling with yourself,” writes Tristen. “Although we can be highly skilled at avoiding these moments of retrospect and shame, for many of us, the pandemic completely eliminated the distractions we can use to keep us away from ourselves, leaving many of us stuck between the same few walls, stuck in our own heads. 

“We are hamsters running inside a metal wheel, trying to keep the monsters at bay. I just kept seeing a group of women stresser-cizing feverishly, even aggressively — attempting to calm the voices in their heads, trying to keep moving, grasping for feel-good chemicals, hoping to please the inner painter of the shadow — as a cool image that would mark the desperation of making the same mistakes over and over again.”

Variations on that theme form the core of Tristen’s self-produced video. The singer and a few friends (including Vanessa Carlton and Alyssa Milano) find themselves trapped in a warped, psychedelic nightmare of a workout video. Give it a look above and preorder via Tristen’s website, your favorite record store or this handy link.