Passion Pit will release a new album entitled Kindred, which is the band’s first project since 2012. Kindred will be available on April 21st, and fans can preorder the album on iTunes today. “Lifted Up (1985)” is the lead single from the 10-track Kindred album. Passion Pit’s lead singer, Michael Angelakos, has always been open about his struggles with depression and bipolar disorder. He spoke to Interview magazine a while ago about dealing with depression since he was a teenager. “It’s hard when you go in and out of different modes of life. When you’re on tour and then you have time off, it’s ultimately a shape-shifting thing,” Angelakos told the magazine. He added, “It was really hard for me to grasp who I was, let alone what music I was making and what I was representing.”
The rocker recently appeared in a PSA video about coping with bipolar disorder, which was produced by actress Glenn Close‘s nonprofit organization, Bring Change 2 Mind. The organization is working to end the stigma and discrimination surrounding mental illness. Angelakos was diagnosed as bipolar when he was 18 years old. He went public with his diagnosis in 2012, when the Passion Pit frontman had to cancel tour dates in order to improve his mental health. “Once I started really just accepting my mental condition, it stung for a little bit and then everything improved,” Angelakos stated in the PSA video. The rocker said seeking treatment was the best decision he ever made because his disorder was affecting every aspect of his life, including his ability to make music. The reality is, suicide rates for men are four times higher than the rates for women. “People don’t understand that it’s not just debilitating, it’s all-encompassing. It’s something you have to work on your entire life,” Angelakos told Rolling Stone magazine.
Passion Pit will perform at several music festivals in the upcoming months including the BUKU festival (March 13,14), McDowell Mountain festival (March 27-29), Big Guava festival (May 8,9), BottleRock festival (May 30), and the WayHome festival (July 24-26). The band will also travel to Tokyo, Japan for back-to-back dates on August 15th and 16th.
The track listing for Kindred is as follows: “Lifted Up (1985),” “Whole Life Story,” “Where the Sky Hangs,” “All I Want,” “Five Foot Ten (I),” “Dancing on the Grave,” “Until We Can’t (Let’s Go),” “Looks Like Rain,” “My Brother Taught Me How to Swim,” and “Ten Feet Tall (II).”