'Townie', the highly anticipated new album from X Ambassadors, the brothers Sam Nelson Harris and Casey Harris along with Adam Levin, released on Friday, 5th of April on Virgin Music.
'Townie' marks a compelling new chapter for X Ambassadors as they return to their upstate New York roots and paint an intricate portrait of their hometown’s most mundane aspects and the community that moulded them. Reflecting on the album, Sam shared, "Townie is a home-coming album. Casey and I are from a small college-town in central New York called Ithaca. Ithaca is home to three universities: an Ivy Leaguer, a liberal arts conservatory, and a state community college. The students make up more than 50% of the population, and the town largely exists for and because of them. They’d call us ‘townies’— the people on the periphery who existed mostly as just background actors in the movies of their college experiences."
"I am a Townie. I will always be a Townie. To deny that is to deny everything that I am. And yes, my town was small, but the people I grew up with never let me think that the world wasn’t big and exciting and out there for the taking. In my town I was loved, I was encouraged, I was accepted, I was challenged, I was knocked down and picked back up again a million times. It might not have been the cultural Mecca I dreamed about, but we had a pretty sick independent movie theater and more than one good coffee shop. The Red Hot Chili Peppers never came to play our State Theater, but that meant less competition for the all-ages shows we’d put on at the Wownet Internet Cafe. The guys at the music store knew my mom, so they let me spend hours in there ‘testing out’ guitars and pedals and recording equipment like I was actually ever going to have the money to buy anything. No one ever made me feel like an idiot for having dreams, or that those dreams couldn’t come true - just that they’d still be there for me, that MY TOWN would be there for me, in case they didn’t."
"I’m so lucky to have grown up where and how I did. Full stop. From the moment I gleefully left town at 18, I think that idea took root in me somewhere; and so, it feels very appropriate that, 18 years later, we’d be putting out an album that’s a love letter to Ithaca and to Upstate New York. This is Townie. For my town and Casey’s, for Adam’s and Russ’, and for you and yours. For the Townies in all of us."
The new music follows a move from the band’s hometown of Ithaca, New York to Brooklyn, an explosive debut album, extensive global touring, as well as recent work with massive artists such as Lizzo, Rihanna, The Weeknd and SZA, and multiple songs penned for major motion pictures.
Townie adds to a renowned career for X Ambassadors, who exploded onto the scene in 2015 with the success of their Platinum-certified debut album, VHS. The record featured singles 'Unsteady' and 'Renegades' which have since garnered more than 1.3 billion streams on Spotify and led the band to a three-year-long world tour. VHS was followed by 'ORION' (2019), the 'Belong' EP (2020), 'The Beautiful Liar' (2021) and '(Eg)' (2023), a series of collaborative singles featuring artists such as BRELAND, Teddy Swims & Jac Ross, Medium Build and PAMÉ.
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