Today, Australian-born bassist and composer Anna Butterss shares their new single and video for “Pokemans,” ahead of their recently-announced debut album for International Anthem, Mighty Vertebrate (due October 4). They’ll also play an album release show in LA on October 4, and live in Chicago September 28, more info below. Listen to “Pokemans” and preorder Mighty Vertebrate here.

“Pokemans” was written under the prompt to elaborate on a guitar riff and drum machine idea by using “the bass in a way that doesn’t conform to the typical role or function of bass; Butterss “wanted to see how things would open up if there wasn’t a bass line.” “Pokemans” echoes Tortoise’s excellent 2001 album Standards as much as it does Four Tet or any of Junichi Masuda’s 8-bit school bus classics, employing a breezy electric guitar theme with 808-style bumps and lo-fi City Pop sounds, sprinkled with delicate, chiming synth melodies in a would-be Gameboy soundtrack. This all cracks wide open at the halfway mark, giving way to a warmly distorted saxophone solo from Josh Johnson and a driving drum beat from Ben Lumsdaine before the theme returns to drive it home.

Extending their ongoing, trusting collaboration with Tortoise member John Hendron, Butterss trusted him entirely with the video for “Pokemans.” Butterss explains, “I first connected with Johnny in maybe 2015 or 2016 – we played a show at the Griffin in Los Feliz with Jeff Parker and Nate Walcott, and it was the first time I’d ever played a whole gig of improvised music, which was very impactful for me. After that, I became enamored with his art… I love working with Johnny because I know he’ll understand the music intuitively, and come up something great without me having to be involved or restrict him in any way. It’s really his vision.”

Watch “Pokemans,” directed by Johnny Herndon, here

As evidenced by Butterss’ remarkably varied CV — one that veers from the krautrock-steeped fusion of emergent Los Angeles supergroup SML and improvisatory jazz workouts alongside Jeff Parker and Makaya McCraven to the skyward indie of Phoebe Bridgers and the anthemic Americana of Jason Isbell, among so much more — their versatility as a collaborator is head-spinning. But that busy schedule can be both a blessing and something of an obstacle.

Mighty Vertebrate — Butterss’ first solo album since Activities — began amid the very real challenge of threading solo work into the dense calendrical web of an in-demand collaborator. “I had just gotten off of a bunch of touring at the end of 2022 and just wanted to write music,” says Butterss. “The best way for me to do that, I’ve found, is to set myself a discrete and focused task.” The prompts read like something out of an Oblique Strategies deck:

I’m going to make a song where the bass doesn’t function in the role of a bass.
I’m going to work on this for an hour and then I’m going to stop.
I’m going to make a song that uses groups of three-bar phrasing.

“Every song was like that,” Butterss continues. “Then once I got started I just followed where my mind wanted to go. It was very structured.”

The music — and even the album artwork, also created by Herndon — reflects that structure beautifully. Butterss’ material was tightly composed and melodically realized before being decked out with candied, kaleidoscopic soundscapes courtesy of album co-producer and percussionist, Ben Lumsdaine. Butterss and Lumsdaine eventually migrated the operation to Chris Schlarb’s Long Beach hideaway BIG EGO to track a selection of full band material with trusted longtime collaborators (and Butterss’ bandmates in SML) Gregory Uhlmann (guitar) and Josh Johnson (saxophone).

This band imbues Mighty Vertebrate with the same confident, chameleonic command that Butterss exhibits across their varied projects. Vintage afrobeat grooves provide ballast for post-modern pedalboard tone sculptures (“Bishop”); Malian desert guitar licks are imbued with a slow roiling post-punk panic (on the Jeff Parker-featuring “Dance Steve”); and placid saxophone elegies are refracted through bubbling synthesis (“Ella”). There are nods towards City Pop, 8-bit video game soundtracks, foreboding post-rock, and lo-fi hip-hop drum machines — all elegantly assembled into a seamless, ever-shifting whole.