After meeting as children while their moms were at Jazzercise, Andrews and Braatz grew up together in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin and were playing in each other’s bands as soon as they could hold guitars. While on tour in 2005, they started writing the songs that would become Freighter’s 2008 self-titled debut album.

Andrews and Braatz reunited in San Francisco five years later and began putting together Freighter’s next act, which begins with the July 2019 release of their second album The Den. On this offering, Freighter has created music that’s engaging for metalheads and nonmetalheads alike. Brutal, complex riffs and powerful vocals weave inside drums that explode with color and life. By eschewing a click track and maintaining continuous unedited drum takes, The Den places a priority on the humanity of the material, giving the production a warmth and bounce that is immediately captivating to all sorts of listeners. Ever-shifting time signatures, metric modulations, and microtonality are juxtaposed with deep grooves and progressive harmonies to lend a sense of unpredictability and unreliability, owing to the album’s thematic focus on the endless struggle with sleep — and the downstream effects of not getting enough of it.

Says Andrews regarding the album:
“The Den is a reclusive (sometimes flamboyant), intuitive (not intellectual), folk art (not fine art). It was designed to be pure fantasy or fiction about sleep and misremembering. There is some OCD about organizing dreams, cataloguing human interactions, and exploring fantasy prone personalities — essentially mental illness in music.”

The Den will be released in vinyl and digital formats on July 12, 2019. Preorder here: https://freighter.bandcamp.com/album/the-den

Praise for Freighter
“…a metal machine that’s ready to match pretty much any riff factory, beat for beat and note for note.” -Isthmus
“…supremely rockin’ stuff, whatever the hell it means.” -The Daily Page
“A trio that knows how to play with metal structures of the past while injecting a contemporary intensity to them.” – Maximum Ink

About Travis Andrews
Travis Andrews is the co-founder and electric guitarist in The Living Earth Show, an iconoclastic San Francisco-based chamber ensemble. In that capacity, Andrews’ performances have been praised as “mind-blowing” and “a vanguard effort of new chamber music” by the San Francisco Examiner and “emotional, transcendent, and at times bursting with raw postrock power” by the Charleston City Paper. Highly in demand as a solo artist, Andrews has been a featured soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. A musical omnivore, Andrews also performs with Magik*Magik, Commando, and chambercore band miRthkon.

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