Strange Men Announce New Single “All The Pretty Houses”

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Róisín Isner (she/her) was seventeen when she found a burned CD wedged above a conduit on the ceiling at a Punk show at San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill. A year later she met male-bassist and fellow teenager Ashley Clayton (he/him) at a birthday party. It would be a few more years before they put together that the demo she’d once found on a club ceiling was his. Flash forward to 2024 and they are the sole members of SF indie punk outfit Strange Men; Róisín plays drums, Ashley plays an 8-string guitar he made out of scavenged wood, and they both sing. Their latest single, All The Pretty Houses, will be released on the 1st November and proves that Strange Men can be pretty, to a point. The track opens with a shimmering guitar loop and Ashley taking a turn at lead vocals, with Róisín offering Kim Deal-esque backup. But the band’s signature fuzz and confrontational lyrics remain. Essentially, All The Pretty Houses is Dream Pop as imagined by a jagged, anti-capitalist Punk duo.

Strange Men

Thematically, the song explores income inequality in San Francisco. The lyrics reflects Isner’s own experience with childhood housing insecurity, as well as her adulthood canvassing voters as a political organizer. Ultimately, the track posits how excessive wealth can be corrosive to an individual’s humanity. “We actually didn’t know about the Marx quote ‘the less you are, the more you have’ when we wrote it,” says Róisín, “but I do think it’s the other way around, the more you get, the less you are”. Strange Men will also be performing a Blur cover set on Halloween at San Francisco’s The Knockout.