The fourth Kid Lightbulbs album / the new single
Announcing Kid Lightbulbs LP4 / the first single, “womb”
posted July 30, 2025
Album 4 will be called INFINITE NORMAL.
The first single is the opening track, “womb”. It’s live on Bandcamp now, just in time for Bandcamp Friday on August 1.
This is a deeply personal song for me. I wrote it originally in 2016 during a period where I was engaged and the 2016 election news cycle was happening, a reflection of wanting to curl up and hide from everything only to realize the importance of not doing that alone. It feels timely once again.
It’s out now exclusively on Bandcamp, along with a b-side, “come alive”, which will not be on the album. It’ll also be out on YouTube and a few other select streaming services next Friday, August 8. (This part is an experiment.)
Here is the cover art for INFINITE NORMAL:
Some backstory on the cover art: A big theme of LP4 is performance, the increasingly performative nature of modern life & the often performative things we do to feel normal.
The photo is from the most recent Buffer team retreat, specifically a karaoke night in which I performed Toto’s seminal hit “Africa” in front of my coworkers. I don’t typically like karaoke, but it was a really fun experience that got me out of my shell in front of many people who I’ve become quite close with over time.
Something about this photo, with the angle and lighting the way it was, felt like it captured the darkness & anxiety behind the surface-level joy that I get from performing, and perhaps a larger statement for how we all feel when we perform in public & online. It can be somehow fun and harrowing, revealing and opaque, vital and trivial all at the same time.
More to come on LP4 in the coming weeks.
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More of my writing this week:
Every artist should have an ethics page
posted July 26, 2025
I think every artist should consider having an ethics page on their site (or write-up somewhere). If we all have stances about things we want more or less of in the world, we should be transparent about this.
I was inspired by the tech writer Casey Newton, who added an Ethics page to his site Platformer. The page is really great - it walks through his financial interests (or lack thereof), what services he uses and has endorsed in the past, and his stance/involvement in the AI industry.
I added a section on this to my own website: https://bgreen.lol/transparency#ethics
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In remembrance of Toupé, an obscure British band I found on MySpace in 2005
posted July 26, 2025
I grilled burgers for dinner the other night, and since then I’ve had this song (really a poem satirizing Elvis) by this obscure British band called Toupé, whom I discovered on MySpace in ~2005. They were 2 bass players (1 4-string playing lead, 1 6-string doing rhythm) & a drummer, like Primus but less dark, more silly.
That was 20 years ago. I still think about this band a lot. They had 3 whole albums and small bit of hype in the UK. They influenced some of how I write & play bass. They’re not completely erased from the Internet, but it was hard to confirm whether they did anything after their 3rd album, Chat! (which is a silly double-entendre using the French word for cat and what it sounds like in English). Turns out they made an EP in 2016 with a guitar player replacing the “lead bassist”, and now I must listen to this.
I was happy to find at least 1 of the members is still making music as recently as last year.
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If any of these resonate with you, I’d love to talk about it! Drop me a message on Bluesky or Threads.
Talk soon ✌️Brandon