Patio - Collection (2023)

When the members of Patio contemplated the inspirations for their long-awaited second album, Collection, they came up with an eclectic mood board comprising videos and images.

A 1977 David Bowie performance of "Heroes” on Top of the Pops. Laura Branigan belting “Gloria” beneath a sea of disco balls. Masterpieces in marble by Michelangelo and Bernini. Jude Law in The Young Pope. Portraits of iconic superstars: A dapper Bryan Ferry, a melancholy Carmela Soprano, Bianca Jagger serving side-eye, and Andy Warhol eating a cheeseburger.

The New York trio — bassist-vocalist Loren DiBlasi, guitarist-vocalist Lindsey-Paige "LP" McCloy, and drummer Alice Suh — were in an unfamiliar space: isolated from each other while undergoing intense individual transformations.

“I realized I no longer recognized myself,” DiBlasi recalls, looking back at the “catastrophic period of change” that was 2020. “But I knew I wanted to dance.” That’s when the “collection” Patio had assembled emerged as “The Party Album.”

Raw, dark, and full of piercing emotional depth, Collection — produced and mixed by Nate Amos (Water from Your Eyes, This Is Lorelei) and mastered by longtime collaborator Amar Lal — is a radiant collage of shifting identities, sensory illusions, and deconstructed disco grooves. More complex and purposeful than the fragile post-punk of 2019 debut Essentials, the album reflects transition, conceived to flow from “day” (contemplative opener “The Sun”) to “night” (dub-inspired closer “Inheritance”). New sonic influences like disco (Donna Summer, The Bee Gees) and 2000s New York indie (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol) evoke freedom and euphoric joy — maintaining the band’s signature minimalism, but with newfound confidence.

"We have become much more comfortable with what I would call the tools of Patio," McCloy says. "Even while separated, we know how to bring aspects of our creative practice together to where it all works."

Throughout the album, McCloy and DiBlasi trade off taking lead vocals and writing lyrics, the latter of which often contain provocative questions. Drawing influence from the works of Linda Ronstadt and author Sally Rooney, McCloy’s songs tend to explore the tension between interior and exterior worlds, or the idea of motion versus stasis. “I write lyrics conversationally,” she says. “They often start out as conversations with other people, but in the end, they turn out to be conversations with myself. I also use lyric writing to try on identities I would never embody in my real life, and so there are some confrontational moments on this record — things that I would never say to someone’s face.”

That led to songs like “Sequence,” an internal monologue about losing touch with your own life, and “En Plein Air,” about having the final say in a fight ("Thank you for letting me make this all about me/ I can be exactly as selfish as you made me out to be"). “Patience,” meanwhile, is full of hard-fought wisdom gleaned from probing the relationship between feeling boxed in physically and emotionally. McCloy's guitars shapeshift effortlessly to fit the mood: Clanging riffs ripple through "Patience," while the brisk "Gold II" boasts rugged jangle and her melodies are thick and blurry on the propulsive "Either Way."

While McCloy pulled 15-hour days working a demanding COVID-19 emergency job for the city — before upending her life for a cross-country move to Los Angeles — DiBlasi led a quieter existence, resulting in deep meditations marked by grief and discontent. Catholicism, generational trauma, and the criticism of Anne Carson are examined on “Relics,” a twisted love song (and cautionary tale) with a menacing bassline that bolts the forefront. “I was thinking about the stories of saints I heard growing up, and real-life tragic figures like Beatrice Cenci,” DiBlasi remembers. “There’s this expectation, historically, that women should sacrifice and suffer, often for the benefit of men.”

Art history and English literature, DiBlasi’s majors in college, summoned further imagination. The soaring “Epiphany” finds her transfixed by a Dutch still life painting she visited at The Met, trying to determine what is real and what is imagined. "Does it glitter when I touch it? Does it exist at all?" she muses, observing that she is “drowning, gasping through the dark, but it’s just oil.”

“I was questioning, ‘How much of my misery is by my own design — my inability to get up and change my own circumstances?’” she says. “That was something I grappled with a lot on this record. In a lot of aspects, I'm the one frozen, while LP is the one pushing forward.”

Suh's drums weave through songs neatly and precisely, like someone threading a needle correctly on the first try. Before her own bold move to Berlin in 2022, she found refuge in the bucolic Hudson Valley, where Patio held monthly practice retreats. “My first job when we get together is to figure out, 'Is this a sad song or a happy song?'” she explains. “Usually, however, they're both like, 'I want it to be disco.’” Lead single “Sixpence” was formed around Suh’s parts; the song encompasses collapsing stair-step beats and jazzy syncopation, conjuring a glam-lounge vibe from the 70s and 80s.

In early 2022, Patio tapped Amos to record Collection with engineer Sasha Stroud at Artifact Audio in Ridgewood, Queens. The location held special significance for DiBlasi, as her Italian-American family has deep roots in the neighborhood (Italian and Sicilian phrases are scattered throughout the record in a nod to her grandmother, Maria). Together with Amos — a “musical genius” who became the band’s “perfect fourth brain” — and with steady and insightful engineering from Stroud, Patio allowed space for in-studio improvisation, adding subtle touches like piano crashes and jagged sounds from a bucket of screws.

"An important element of Patio is that we are very polished and precise in our intention, but we leave room for it to still feel a little raw,” DiBlasi notes. It’s right there — in the liminal spaces between dark and light, together and apart — where Collection shines.