The Record Company has signed with Jeff Castelaz of Cast Management, the band tells Billboard.
The signing announcement follows the release of the band’s fan-driven The 4th Album, which dropped in September via Round Hill Records, its new label home after being dropped by Concord Music late last year.
Formed in 2011, the Grammy-nominated, L.A.-based roots rock trio featuring Chris Vos (guitar, lead vocals), Alex Stiff (bass), and Marc Cazorla (drums). The band’s first album, Give It Back To You, which included the hit single “Off the Ground,” earned it two Grammy nominations, a No. 1 single on AAA radio and a slot opening for John Mayer on tour.
With a new album out, The Record Company is returning to the road in 2023. It will play the Regent Theatre in L.A. later this month (Nov. 18) before heading out on tour in January for a rebooked cross-country run during which they will play White Oak Music Hall in Houston (Jan. 20), the 9:30 Club in Washington DC (Feb. 2) and the Fillmore in San Francisco (Mar. 14).
“The new record is us taking our own advice from ‘Off the Ground,’ which is a very honest reflection of where we had been in our careers and how we we’re going to get ourselves in gear to keep moving,” Vos tells Billboard. “As an artist, when you’re in a moment where a challenge comes at you, the only choice you really have is to do what you feel is the most honest and true to yourself, and that’s what we are trying to do with this album.”
Dropped by its previous label at the end of last year, the band canceled its tour and began working on writing new music, planning to “hold ourselves accountable to these songs,” Vos explains. “When we finished, we felt like we [made] a really honest record and we could stand behind that.”
The new album was recorded inside Stiff’s L.A. house and relied on older, weathered instruments and makeshift studio equipment to capture a more rootsy sound. Prior to recording, the group members told themselves, “Let’s just do that thing that got us excited years ago when we started the band,” Stiff says. “Just putting our heads together and setting up the mics and doing it ourselves.”
Cazorla remembered that when they pulled out his drumset, the “heads on the drums had not been changed in 12 years. There wasn’t a conscious decision not to include anything new — but there’s magic in those old instruments. They sound like they’ve got stories to tell.”
The 4th Record had been well received by fans for its back-to-its-roots sound, consistency and raw, rowdy moments like first single “Dance on Mondays,” a feisty toe-tapper that opens with a needling bassine and garage-rock-to-blues chorus.
“It’s a song about fighting your way out of a dead-end,” says Stiff, who came up with the song’s hook as a quick quip after being invited out on a school night. Over time, the idea became about saying, “I’m not doing a f—ing dance to anybody anymore,” he adds. “That’s how I’m gonna rebound out of this feeling I’m having. It’s how I am going to overcome it and beat it in the end.”
The next single for The Record Company is “Roll With It,” a more traditional roots rock track with plenty of handclaps, vocal harmonies and call and response choruses — challenging the band to follow up its past success with new victories while maintaining its timeless sound.
“That’s like very much a lot of what’s happened to us in our career,” says Stiff. “We get this like unexpected hit song and we became surrounded by people asking how we are going to duplicate our success; essentially duplicate something that just kind of happened. We don’t know, but we do like how this song, one of the last ones we wrote for this album, came together pretty quickly and very much sounds like our kind of thing, and we’re pretty psyched with it.”
