The FADER Interview: On “French Fries,” Alaska Reid goes windows down, volume up

Alaska Reid is this week’s guest on The FADER Interview podcast. Speaking to The FADER’s Walden Green, the singer-songwriter from Los Angeles by way of Montana shared some words of wisdom courtesy of Speedy Ortiz‘s Sadie Dupuis: “She said something really interesting to me that I hadn’t heard someone say: ‘I’m building upon my past work and enriching it.’”

On Reid’s debut album Disenchanter, out this Friday (July 14) via Luminelle, she enriches the groundwork she’s laid before — her guitar-forward indie rock outfit Alyeska, the glitch-pop of 2020’s A.G. Cook-produced Big Bunny — to yield her most complete body of work yet.

On Tuesday (July 11), Reid shared the fourth and final single from her new record. “French Fries,” is Disenchanter’s opening track, the kind of song that begs to be played over a car radio with the windows rolled down and volume cranked all the way up. Once the beat kicks in, her insistent guitar strums and Cook’s cavernous production dovetail into a captivating approximation of ’80s heartland rock. Through the music of John Mellencamp, Don Henley, and Bruce Springsteen circa Born in the U.S.A., Reid embraces the wide open spaces of her home state and a long-ignored instinct for gorgeous, catchy hooks.

“For so long I thought it was a dirty thing to have a tightly structured song,” she said. “I’d be like, ‘Why? I can just jam out on the bridge for forever,’ which is something I really like to do. And then I started thinking about the songs I gravitate towards in life, and how I wasn’t applying those rules to them. I didn’t wanna hear a Fleetwood Mac song that jammed out forever and didn’t return to a great chorus. So I started applying that mentality to my own songs, like, ‘It’s just about writing a good song.’”

Watch the self-directed video for “French Fries” below. You can hear Alaska Reid’s full FADER Interview episode via this link, embedded at the bottom of this post, or wherever you get your podcasts.