Today, Attention Bird Utopia — the new collaborative project of guitarist / songwriter Harrison Whitford (Phoebe Bridgers, Matt Berninger, Conor Oberst) and producer / songwriter Eli Hirsch (Suki Waterhouse, Cautious Clay, Say Lou Lou) — announces Best of Kings, their debut album due out June 6 on the duo’s label here, here recordings.

Lead single “Infinity Inside a Shopping Cart” exemplifies both the project’s unassuming charm and abundant displays of casual songwriting mastery. It’s a cryptic and cozy introduction to Attention Bird Utopia’s world of DIY pop symphonies.

Says Harrison about the song: “This song is a collage. It’s about trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense, and the non-linear nature of lived experience in spite of the construct of linear time. It’s also about whatever you want it to be. Eli and I set up a few mics, I recorded the piano and then he jumped on the drums. From there, we did everything else. The guitar solo has vertigo. Enjoy.”

Listen to “Infinity Inside a Shopping Cart” here.

Attention Bird Utopia’s genesis begins when Eli was executive producing Suki Waterhouse’s 2024 LP Memoir of A Sparklemufin at his studio in Los Angeles and Harry dropped in on an afternoon recording session. The two hit it off, and soon Whitford started coming over to Eli’s home studio to blow off steam while playing chess (Eli humbly admits, with a hint of awe, that Harry is the superior chess player: “I’ll never beat him”). They bonded over their love of The Beatles, Jackson Browne, and Paul Simon, and Harry exposed Eli to the deeper cuts from the songbooks of country legends like Hank Williams and Willie Nelson.

While both accomplished, in-demand collaborators, they both shared a sense of restlessness about their own songwriting — they realized that years could go by only working on other peoples records, ignoring their own creative impulse. So they made a pact: they would meet every Friday to share new songwriting ideas, a kind of accountability exercise.

These hangs quickly escalated into a collection of new songs. While they had a deeply ingrained shared musical language, their artistic approaches, as Eli recounts, were perfect counterbalances: “For me, Harry’s notes were usually about things not needing to be so literal — he’s definitely a poet. And my notes for Harry were usually structure related, like how to shape the song.” 

Throughout the nine songs on Best of Kings, it becomes clear that the Whitford / Hirsch songwriting partnership was a potent one (“It’s a tale as old as time: two Jews writing music together,” Eli jokes, referencing a rich history of such collaborations). Whether it’s surprisingly melancholic celebrity run-ins (“Beck’s Eyes”), dispatches from imagined lonesome LA cowboys (“Brother, Oh Brother”), or sweeping travelogue anthems packed with botched plastic surgery and corporatized occultism (“One Step at a Time”), Attention Bird Utopia prove themselves adroit students of pop songcraft of any stripe.