Bleached - "Can You Deal?"

Photo by Nicole Anne Robbins

One of our favorite 90s throwback artists are back. Bleached have a new EP called Can You Deal? due out on March 3. The title track is exactly what we want from Bleached. "Can You Deal?" is poppy and catchy, but with a plethora of 90s alternative noise behind it. I always see them described as punk, but to me they're more dream punk. They have all the swirling guitars and spacey melodies of dream pop, but just a little more aggression than that moniker would allow for. 

In addition to the Can You Deal? EP, Bleached are releasing a Can You Deal? zine. The zine will feature contributions that define a who's who of the current genre ignoring indie scene including Alice Glass, Lizzo, Kate Nash, Tegan Quin, Allie Hanlon, Sadie Dupuis, and more. Bleached's Jennifer Clavin had this to say about the project:\

I create music and art because I need to. To express, to bond, to reconcile, and to connect. And to use my voice. To have it received with such a generic labeling as "girl band" and consistently referenced as "female fronted" is insulting and reductive.  The title track to this EP, “Can You Deal?” is about this experience. Last year we released a deeply personal full length album titled Welcome The Worms. It was a record about being in an emotionally abusive relationship. It was a record about getting spun out on drugs and alcohol. It was a record about totally losing myself in order to find myself.  It was also our most ambitious body of work yet, with guitar work and guitar sounds and production we had only dreamed of until then.  And yet to this day I am still fielding interview questions that have more to do with my gender than with the art I am creating. Somehow the conversation usually derails into some variation of the following question: "What is it like to be a girl in a rock band?". And the ensuing story will define us based on our sex. Why is gender pointed out in nearly all coverage of our band? Labeling me as a woman in a band just puts me in a box, and doesn’t allow everything else I am to be seen and heard. It's 2017, Can You Deal with women playing rock and roll yet? 

You can pre-order the EP here, and the zine here. Make sure you listen to "Can You Deal?" below, and head over to their website for more on Bleached.