Polica - United Crushers (2016)

‘United Crushers’ is POLIÇA’s third full length release and most remarkable album to date. The band, which includes Channy Leaneagh, dual drummers, Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu and Chris Beirden on bass with producer Ryan Olson at the helm, collectively wrote the album in Minneapolis in the winter of 2015 during their first true break from two years of touring. They recorded it at the renowned Sonic Ranch Studios in El Paso, TX, nestled just a few short miles from the US/Mexico border. The new album builds on POLIÇA’s signature synthesizer and percussion-heavy sounds with more complex arrangements and a bigger, crisper hi fi punch due to the new approach they took to writing and recording: together, all in the same room. There's a tighter groove to these songs and a more vulnerable quality to them, especially in Leaneagh's singing. Her incredible vocal range is on display throughout, beautifully raw and less effected than on previous recordings.


The themes found and explored on ‘United Crushers’ are political and personal and touch on social injustice, self-doubt and isolation, urban decline and gentrification, overcoming music industry machinations, and finding true and honest love in the wake of it all. Even at its darkest, the record is musically the band's most upbeat and celebratory. It is a weapon meant to empower the weak, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised.


‘United Crushers’ is the follow up to 2013’s ‘Shulamith’ which EW called "propulsive enough for dance floors, and dreamy enough for headphones" and MOJO said "proves that intelligent pop music still has the ability to seduce and enthral." Their debut, 2012's ‘Give You The Ghost,’ also garnered international acclaim, with Rolling Stone hailing it as "the sound of heartbreak and celebration happening simultaneously" and Q praising it as "a bewitching, urgent, magical debut." The band has conquered massive festivals around the world from Coachella to Glastonbury in addition to performing on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Later With Jools Holland and more.