Chicago’s Sen Morimoto has announced his third album: Diagnosis is out November 3 via City Slang in partnership with Sooper Records. The announcement comes with the release of the title track and its music video. In the visual—directed by New Trash and Morimoto—Morimoto plays a grocery store clerk who submits his music to a huge corporation; things go awry. Watch “Diagnosis” below.
Morimoto released his first two albums, 2018’s Cannonball! and a 2020 self-titled effort, through Sooper. “I’ve now released a couple of albums in a time when the most commercially exploitable asset an artist has is their social identity and their trauma,” the musician said in a press statement. “Over this time the discussion of this pattern has come up repeatedly with peers who felt similarly tired of being expected to share every private detail of an immigrant household or to romanticize the struggle of their working class upbringing only to find questions on the craft itself reserved for artists without those burdens. While the songs on my third album range in topic from love to radicalization to spirituality and the internal effects of life under capitalism, every song on Diagnosis is, at its core, an attempt to flip the lens around. To hold a magnifying glass over the systems we live in and empower us to investigate them with the same scrutiny.”
On Friday, July 21, Sen Morimoto is performing at Chicago’s Pitchfork Music Festival. The next night, he’s performing at Schubas Tavern for an official Pitchfork Music Festival aftershow. Tickets are still available.
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Diagnosis:
01 If the Answer Isn’t Love
02 Bad State
03 St. Peter Blind
04 Diagnosis
05 Pressure on the Pulse
06 Naive
07 Feel Change
08 What You Say
09 Surrender
10 Deeper
11 Pain
12 Forsythia (レンギョウの旋律)
13 Reality
