The Hundred in the Hands LP is an album of deceptively complex pop songs which hark back to the dance music of NYC’s storied underground. The album is a product of DIY home-recording plus a series of studio sessions in London and New York with contributions by producer friends including Jacques Renault, Richard X, Eric Broucek and Chris Zane.

The Hundred in the Hands is Eleanore Everdell and Jason Friedman. Together they make music that feels vigorously electric yet intensely human; physical yet bodiless; commanding yet vulnerable. Together they bridge the gap between pulsing dance-floor Armageddon and feverish intimacy - between the communal and the personal.
Jason and Eleanore - co-conspirators living in Brooklyn - discovered their shared sensibility for early hip hop, French house and disco, ska and dub, post-punk, British invasion-mod and girl pop from the 60’s through the 80’s. The duo found their tastes meshed over an impossibly broad spectrum of sounds and eras, and they decided to make music together. Their first song - the electrifying post-punk rave-up “Dressed in Dresden” - was written and recorded in a couple of days, released online, picked up and released as a 45 by a record shop in the U.K. where they were soon playing shows and coming to the attention of Warp Records. But, rather than following the sometimes mad-rush of a hype driven media, the two retreated to the bunker to write and record. During that time, Jason and Eleanore focused on deciding exactly who they wanted to be. What they discovered and emerged with were 17 startling new tracks and a precise and deliberate sound.
The band’s self-titled debut album (and its equally stunning predecessor, the sun-drenched, blissed-out EP This Desert) is a product of DIY home-recording plus a series of studio sessions alongside visionary producers Richard X in London and Jacques Renault, Chris Zane and longtime DFA associate Eric Broucek in New York. It is an epic album of adventurously crafted, perfectly manufactured and deceptively complex pop songs that embrace the duality between the electronic and the organic, between night and day.
Equal parts mutant disco, 80’s pop queen and Yé Yé girl, Eleanore’s epic vocals and lavish synths - both full and flirty, desperate and demanding - belie a naturalism that’s intensified and offset by Jason’s bass lines, programmed beats and guitars that swerve from angular, full-throttle riffs to vaporous and ephemeral shadows. Jason and Eleanore trade menacing metallic, razor sharp, turns, assembling towering melodies atop pulsing rhythms.
With a brassy carnality, the record veers from Disco dazed, avant-pop (“Young Aren’t Young”) to teenage angst, boredom and pop heartache (“Pigeons”) as Jason’s piercing guitar lines zig and zag with Eleanore’s soaring harmonies and Siouxsie-esque yelps. A late-night dance party (“Commotion”) and Post-R&B dub (“This Day Is Made”, “Lovesick (Once Again)”) spin into mind-bending mash-ups of skuzzy rock riffs and obliterated beats (“Gold Blood”) relieved finally in an austere anti-ballad to failed rebellion (“The Beach”). Elsewhere, glistening, conversational minimal wave (“Killing It”) bleeds into dreamy synth-pop (“Dead Ending”), crumbles into restrained punk (“Last City”) and bursts in the song that started it all - the incisive disco-punk dance-off, “Dressed in Dresden.”
In the end, The Hundred in the Hands is everything all at once and nothing you’d ever expect. Jason and Eleanore bend and blend styles, sounds and eras into something that doesn't feel confused, fake or forced. It just feels fun.