Perfect 100 Turns Time Anxiety Into Lo-Fi Pop on “Around My Finger”

Andrew Madore spends most of his touring hours playing guitar in Dazy’s live band, backing James Goodson. Perfect 100 is where his own songs go. The project has been quiet since last year’s self-titled EP, and the new single “Around My Finger” is out now on bloody knuckles.

Madore recorded most of it at home in his Brooklyn apartment, with Will Hirst of Restraining Order on drums. The result is fuzzy indie pop built the way that tradition usually is: melody doing the heavy lifting, the recording kept rough enough that you can hear the room. Alexa Terfloth’s video follows the same logic, lo-res and unpolished, moving at the song’s pace rather than dressing it up.

The lyric works from a recognizable kind of paralysis. In a press release, Madore says he wrote the song while stuck in “the anxiety of losing time,” unable to answer friends, leave the house, or consider his own life without counting the hours already gone. His solution is an image rather than a resolution: time wrapped around a finger, held in a hand, stopped.

Perfect 100 plays New York’s Alphaville on November 12.