Les Savy Fav Return With New Single “Legendary Tippers”

Les Savy Fav are finally back with their first new music in 14 years, a party bop called “Legendary Tippers,” which arrives alongside a delightful music video.

WATCH VIDEO FOR “LEGENDARY TIPPERS” HERE

It’s brimming with Laissez-faire swagger. The lyrics landing between uppercrust and dumb drunk. The music follows suit – singer Tim Harrington says, “The guitars have this offhanded virtuoso thing going. Seth had stacked all of these semi-improvised scratch tracks into a demo. When I got them, I was immediately drawn to the manic pile-up of using them all, all at once, with zero edits. It’s like if the solo from ‘Taxman’ wolfed down a bottle of Adderall.” 

It’s been a long while since LSF has released anything, and this might seem an odd track to come back with, but it does a kind of amazing job capturing the unhinged, delighted energy of their live shows – a fire that’s always been hard to bottle on recordings.

Last year, Les Savy Fav teased their comeback with a series of one-off shows, including a string of European festival appearances and an intimate gig at the newly opened Knitting Factory NYC alongside Marnie Stern, another enigmatic artist who had been away from the live stage for some time.

2024 will sees the band returning to the live stage and spreading their wings further. As well as UK and Irish dates, the band have recently been announced for Primavera in May.

LES SAVY FAV LIVE

February 23 – Camden, UK – Electric Ballroom
February 24 – Bristol, UK – Simple Things Festival
May 24 – Dublin, IRE – Whelans
May 25 – Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club
May 28 – Barcelona, ESP – Primavera Festival

It’s impossible to talk about Les Savy Fav without acknowledging that it’s been more than 10 years since the guys released 2010’s Root for Ruin. But it’s not like they had a messy breakup or quit to become bankers. They just had a lot of living to do. 

“When we finished our last record, there was a sense that if we were going to do more, we wanted to do something more ambitious,” singer Tim Harrington says. “I think it took us a while to even get in a space where that was possible.” Remember, these five men — Harrington, Seth Jabour, Syd Butler, Harrison Haynes, Andrew Reuland — have been friends and collaborators since 1995, when they attended Rhode Island School of Design. It takes a beat to shake old habits.

In the interim, the band has been busy building growing their families, taking and losing jobs, and living through the various ecstatic and hideous aspects of growing older. Harrington wrote and illustrated children’s books (like 2015’s Nose to Toes, You are Yummy), ran out of money, built his attic studio, wrestled with mental health issues, and got a job-job as a creative director. Butler continued to run his label, Frenchkiss (which has released the majority of the band’s albums, including their newest material), and, along with Jabour, honed his writing skills as a member of Seth Meyers’ 8G band.

Harrison left his career teaching to focus on fine art, while Reuland built a reputation as a film/commercial editor and writer on Adult Swim’s cult show Ballmastrz: 9009. That onslaught of personal ambitions and adulting could spell death for many bands, but, as Harrington puts it: “The band was never a job, so we can’t get fired and don’t have to quit. We had the time to figure out how to bring the people we’ve become and the people we are as artists together authentically. There’s a chaotic, untethered ecstasy at the center of the band’s universe. Squaring that with the desire to create stability and the need to endure some grind isn’t easy.”

Over the years, the band has continued to perform, always on their own terms, but after a stint at Primavera in 2022, they caught the proverbial songwriting bug once more, sharing demos, jamming in Harrington’s attic, and recording through the heap of DIY and esoteric gear Harrington collected over the last decade. The resulting new music is a glorious mix of tragedy and comedy — studded with nods to the band’s eclectic musical taste — delightfully weird and utterly them.

A decade may have passed, but Les Savy Fav is still growing — like their musical range, like the seeds that grew into their album art, like the hope that someday they can say: “We were there when the world got great, we helped to make it that way!”

Here’s to 10 more years.