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The project of
Hannah Lew,
Cold Beat combines stark instrumentation that straddles coldwave and post-punk with deeply felt songwriting. From the beginning,
Lew dove into big-picture topics: On 2014's
Over Me, the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist explored the death of her father and loss in general on compact, driving songs that harked back to the heyday of Tubeway Army,
Blondie, and
the Sound (whose song "Cold Beat" gave
Lew's project its name). The changing face of her hometown of San Francisco in the wake of the tech boom informed 2015's Into the Air, which added jangly indie pop, motorik, and minimal synth experiments to
Lew's repertoire. Later, the electronic elements of
Cold Beat's music came to the forefront on 2020's polished, expansive
Mother, which reflected the influence of
Eurythmics (as well as
Lew's motherhood), and on the following year's introspective War Garden.
Lew began writing
Cold Beat songs in the late 2000s while playing with the acclaimed San Francisco trio
Grass Widow and establishing herself as a filmmaker and visual artist. When the band went on hiatus after releasing 2012's
Internal Logic,
Lew focused on
Cold Beat in earnest. She took Neon Piss guitarist
Kyle King,
Shannon & the Clams guitarist/synth player
Cody Blanchard, and former
Grass Widow drummer Lillian Maring into the studio to record November 2013's Worms/Year 5772, a set of songs touching on the death of her father and her own insomnia. The first release on
Lew's Crime on the Moon label, it also featured remixes by
POW! and
Total Control's
Mikey Young, with whom
Lew forged a long-running creative partnership.
Lew continued her meditations on grief with
Cold Beat's first full-length, July 2014's
Over Me. Recorded by
Trans Am's
Phil Manley and mixed and mastered by
Young, it found
Lew backed by
King and
Erase Errata drummer Bianca Sparta.
Cold Beat's lineup and sound continued to evolve quickly. Just over a year after the release of
Over Me, the band returned with September 2015's Into the Air, which featured drummer Susi Leni and guitarist Jackson Blumgart alongside
Lew and
King. Partly influenced by San Francisco's rapid gentrification thanks to the tech boom, the album boasted a more electronic-based sound that informed the
Cold Beat albums that followed.
Lew wrote and recorded most of 2017's more intimate
Chaos by Invitation on her own, later bringing in
Manley,
Young,
King, and Blumgart for additional tracking. In August 2018,
Cold Beat returned with A Simple Reflection, an EP of
Eurythmics covers that expanded the group's lineup to include
King, guitarist
Sean Monaghan and keyboardist Luciano Talpini Aita. The EP's lush, synth-driven sound laid the musical groundwork for the band's fourth album.
Mother, which was inspired by
Lew's pregnancy as well as the tumultuous state of the world, was released by DFA in February 2020. A year later, the Double Sided Mirror Remix EP featured reworkings of the
Mother track by
Cabaret Voltaire's
Stephen Mallinder and
Cooper Saver. Recorded via Zoom during the COVID-19 global pandemic, September 2021's War Garden continued
Cold Beat's more danceable direction as it meditated on loss, separation, and resilience. ~ Heather Phares