Armor For Sleep Share Video For Whatever, Who Cares; The Rain Museum LP Out September 9th Via Rude Records & Equal Vision Records

Armor for Sleep have revealed their latest single, ‘Whatever, Who Cares’, taken from their upcoming album The Rain Museum. The new album comes as the band’s first piece of new music in 15 years, due for release 9th September via Rude Records (UK/EU) and Equal Vision Records (ROW).

It’s been almost 20 years since the release of Armor For Sleep’s previous full-length, What To Do When You Are Dead. Now, with latest track ‘Whatever, Who Cares’, vocalist BenJorgensen explains:

“’Whatever, Who Cares’ is a song about coming to grips with the fact that certain wounds are inescapably self-inflicted. But instead of this being a song about having the strength to overcome these truths, this song is about the moments where just accepting the absurdity of it all seems like the least painful route to take. The video follows the story of a couple, (the same couple from our ‘How Far Apart’ music video), being subjected to a strange experiment at the hands of a mysterious organisation. Their relationship is engineered to end in repeated failure, and they find themselves unable to prevail, ultimately choosing poison bottles over fighting to escape the cycle.”

On the upcoming album, vocalist Ben Jorgensen states: “We are very excited to share our new album, The Rain Museum. Back in 2020, at the start of the pandemic and at the start of our collective lockdown, I made it my mission to finish writing a concept album that had been in my mind for many years but was never able to bring to life. The Rain Museum was initially a short story I wrote many years ago about a post-apocalyptic Earth and a mysterious museum in the middle of the desert. Weaving the story into an album was going to be my quarantine project.

“Unfortunately, my marriage of nearly eight years and basically my entire life fell apart as I was beginning the writing process. The one thing I had in my life to divert my attention from what I was going through was the creative process of writing that album. But because I couldn’t ignore what I was going through personally, I wound up writing about myself and what I was going through and putting that into the story of the album and into the world I had been creating for this concept record. In the end, it’s an album about facing some of the most painful parts of being human and how lost we can get. I just hope it will speak to people going through their own dark times, as my favourite art certainly helped me get through mine.”

‘Whatever, Who Cares’ is the second single to be released from The Rain Museum, the band’s upcoming full-length that is 17 years in the making. It’s a concept album built around a post-apocalyptic world where weather no longer exists on planet Earth and people come to a mysterious museum in the middle of the desert to look back on what life used to be like. Originally planned as the follow up to What to Do When You Are Dead, the album had been shelved due to “bad advice” leading the band in another direction. Fast forward to the global pandemic of 2020, and the events of the real world encouraged Jorgensen to revisit the concept. The result is a beautiful and devastating 12 song collection that draws upon the best elements of Armor For Sleep’s catalogue while incorporating elevated song-writing and composition. After a fifteen year absence from the studio, The Rain Museum will undoubtedly prove to be well-worth the wait for old and new fans alike.