Bartees Strange – “Xmas”

Bartees Strange is in the middle of rolling out his new album Horror, but he’s taking a break from that today to give us a great new holiday single. “Xmas” finds Strange tapping into that Mk.gee/1975 guitar sound and borrowing some melodic phrasing from Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” in service of pure, uncut seasonal melancholia. “Yeah, it’s Christmas/ And you don’t even want me at all,” he sings on the chorus. “Wonderin’ if you’ll ever call/ Christmas at the end of the world.” It sounds like an alternate-universe ’90s pop song, and it rules.

In other Bartees news, he’s opening for TV On The Radio at their Nov. 30 NYC gig. “Very excited to say that I’ll be opening for my biggest musical heros next Saturday 11/30 at @websterhall,” he writes on Instagram. “High strangeness, and extreme gratitude – to the band that has loomed large in my mind since letterman put me on so so long ago. It was High school. I’ll be solo, it’ll be sweet.”

Hear “Xmas” and check out the social post below.