WATCH: Soft Punch Shares “My Aim Is True”

New album, Above Water, due out September 15th

September 6, 2023September 8, 2023 Ron Hart 0 Comments 2023, Bad Friend Records, Bjork, Elliott Smith, Frank Ocean, music video, My Aim Is True, Paul McCartney, Rye Thomas, Soft Punch, Sparklehorse

Rye Thomas of Soft Punch (Image: Micah E. Wood)

Soft Punch is the artful solo project from Washington DC-based musician and writer Rye Thomas.

It was born from the years he spent in the mid-to-late 2010s homebound from a debilitating mystery illness he contracted in 2013, leaving behind an active lifestyle on the DC music scene. Yet despite suffering from crippling migraines, he never stopped writing music from the confines of his blacked-out bedroom, the results of which comprise the bones of the first Soft Punch LP Above Water.

Once his health improved, Thomas entered his home studio to flesh out this buoyant catalog of songs with the help of his longtime boyfriend and some friends he called up for added instrumentation. The end result is an illuminating, multidimensional pop record informed by Thomas’s personal listening favorites: Björk, Elliott Smith, Sparklehorse, Frank Ocean. It’s a collection of songs about living with loss and discovering beauty in unexpected corners of life, done in the spirit of the first Paul McCartney solo album.

Soft Punch Above Water, Bad Friend Records 2023

Rock & Roll Globe is honored to premiere the video for the first single off Above Water, entitled “My Aim Is True,” a song whose atmospheric beauty shimmers through the screen.

“I wrote ‘My Aim Is True’ back in 2018, when I was stuck in bed,” Thomas explains. “I just wanted to place the joy of a love song within the reality of being ill. The song itself is pretty direct, and I stuck with a classic, McCartney-style approach to writing it. In the studio, I layered sounds from a hospital stay alongside recordings of birds outside my window to create atmosphere. I think the ambient sections leave room for both the intimacy of romance and the isolation of illness.”

Watch the video below and pre-order Above Water, which comes out on September 15th via Bad Friend Records, here.