Pickle Darling shares a final single “Congratulations Champion” ahead of their new album Bots out Friday, September 5th. Lukas Mayo, the artist behind Pickle Darling, has always thrived in the margins favoring quiet devotion over quick virality, patience over polish. On Bots, their most fractured and sonically unruly album to date, Mayo quite literally pushed their computer to its limits. Songs were layered until files became unopenable, and in some cases, abandoned entirely. It’s a fitting collapse for a record about emotional static, creative friction, and the strange beauty found in ruin.
“Congratulations Champion” is a timestamp of sorts; a mosaic of one-liners pulled from Mayo’s phone notes and set to a melody that slots in like a missing puzzle piece. It’s a song of small, specific heartbreaks, strung together with warmth and warped logic. The standout lyric, “You know I’m gonna love you still / Like black mold loves the windowsill,” lands somewhere between devotion and decay, a perfect encapsulation of Bots’ tone: earnest, unsettling, and strangely sweet. Out September 5th via Father/Daughter Records, Bots is the latest chapter in Pickle Darling’s ongoing exploration of how broken things can still feel whole.
On the track, Mayo shares: “This one collects a bunch of stand alone lines I’ve had on my phone. Some songs function purely as a timestamp for me, it has so many things in it that point to a specific moment in 2022. I was listening to a lot of R.E.M., at the time, I love melodies that kind of just ‘slot’ into place."