Anthony Family

Across their two-decade run, Ceremony have been a lot of things. In fact, to harp on the post-punk band’s eclecticism and mutability would dangerously flirt with cliché.

“It’s only noteworthy within the confines of punk. Most bands that have had a long career, with a large body of work, have evolved a lot,” Anthony Anzaldo — Ceremony’s founding guitarist of 20 years, whose record collection would kill him if it fell over — says with a smile. “Listen to Boys Don’t Cry, and then listen to Disintegration. Listen to David Bowie; listen to the Beatles; listen to Barbra f—ing Streisand!”

That being said, Anthony Family — Anzaldo’s radiant new project, where he drives the train — is a left turn for an artist known for them. “What you’re going to hear will be unfamiliar to you at first, if you are a fan of the other things I do,” he says.

Over the years, Ceremony have explored hardcore, post-punk, indie rock, new wave, and beyond. For Anzaldo, in 2024, highly personal, emotionally complex sophisti-pop is the order of the day. And his project’s debut, Live From An Ordinary Place — to be released TK via Pure Noise Records — is a fascinating (re)introduction to Anzaldo as an artist on his own terms.

In tracing Anthony Family’s DNA, if you were to point to Howard Jones, Prefab Sprout, or Yazoo, you’d be on the right track. Ditto the Blue Nile, Scritti Politti — or his all-time hero, Prince. (“I think about him every day in my life,” Anzaldo says of the Purple One. “It’s so beyond that, He doesn’t even consciously register as an influence.”) As for contemporary analogs: think Blood Orange, Perfume Genius, Caroline Polachek, Orville Peck and Fabiana Palladino.

Anzaldo has been writing Anthony Family for years; he had a nascent blueprint for the album in mind for almost a decade. He recorded it over the span of a year, whenever he was able to get in a studio — “until I felt like I had a cohesive body of work that was reflecting where I’m at and how I feel.”

Speaking of “Soulless”: that slow-boiling, seven-minute opening track means a lot to Anzaldo. “It’s hard to say when written long from/ The plot then strays, yet I’m afraid to implore,” he sings. “And If I gave you a lead you’d hand it right back/ With revisions that’d read, explicitly: Who you are, what you want, and you why you ‘just can’t.’”

“It says a lot, and it does a lot,” he says. “It’s everything that encapsulates my songwriting, and what the project is. I feel that this song is the best representation of it — sonically, instrumentationally, performability, lyrically. This is the whole menu and the statement.”

About the lead single, “101 North”: “Thirty years ago, if you would have told me that I was going to be able to write a song like this, I would have said, ‘I cannot wait to be 30 years older,’” he says. “It’s a song that I’ve been wanting to write my whole life — and finally being able to have the ability and mind to pull it off, that’s the success.”

“Your Dress on Me” follows, a fractal of nuances regarding sex and gender. “I’m a straight person. But do I relate or identify as what the civilian world identifies as a straight male? Not necessarily. If that sounds clunky and messy, it’s because it is. The feelings that I have about this song are clunky and messy and aren’t easily defined. My space within the definition of ‘queer,’ I haven’t felt the need to define either, but I do know that I feel how I feel.”

Anzaldo considers “Sex in the Car” to be a companion piece to “Your Dress on Me.” “I had these both done and written and compartmentalized separately for the longest time,” he reflets. “It was such a joywhen I was able to finally crack that code and figure out that they were linked — sonically, musically, thematically.”

The interlude “(thirtyseven)” is a voicemail Anzaldo’s mom and little sister sent him on his 37th birthday, with an atmospheric bed of sound undergirding it. “It’s just a really touching, beautiful message,” he says. “Everything I know to be true about my mother; everything that she knows and feels about me is exemplified in this message. It’s a really sweet, accurate and honest portrayal of the both of us.”

About “Fine From a Distance”: “You’re not always supposed to ebb and flow in your feelings,” Anzaldo intuits. “The complexity of a feeling doesn’t necessarily have to coincide with how much action you take, or how many feelings you may have.” To him, the song exemplifies this, “both in the dynamic of the song musically, but also with its general message. It’s major, yet dissonant, and I feel like that plays an important role in the ride that you go on as a listener.”

“Overmorrow” is another psychological can of worms: “It would be nice/ if I could fight/ All of the urges and start searching/ For someone who truly believes/ In all of these things that are buried in me,” he sings. (“If you feel like what’s ahead of you doesn’t serve you, hopefully you’re wrong,” Anzaldo contends.)

“Nothing Something Everything Onemorething” is mostly an instrumental — but on Anthony Family, it acts as a lynchpin. “ I just crack myself up sometimes,” Anzaldo says. “Of course the song with the least amount of words is the one with the most complex and all encompassing point of view.”

Anthony Family concludes with “Wander With Me,” which Anzaldo proclaims to be “one of my favorites, if not my favorite song on the album. It’s very simple in its performance and its tonality, in its sentiment and instrumentation.”

Which harkens back to Anzaldo’s core dictum making music: “What do I want from this song? What does this song want from me? What do I want you to feel when you hear this song?” he says. “And will that feeling be conveyed best through full band, synth, guitar, everything? Would that feeling be best with just meeting guitar? Or would that feeling be best over the span of seven minutes with a lot of space, you know?

“The process for every tune is different; getting to the destination is always different.” And it’s that destination that matters: the station of the human heart, and Anzaldo’s beats deeper than most. Welcome, and meet the family.

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