Gordi Announces New Album 'Like Plasticine,' Drops New Single

Australian indie singer, songwriter and producer Gordi (real name Sophie Payten) has announced her third album, Like Plasticine, and shared the surprisingly pop new single, Peripheral Lover.

An ode to queer love, Peripheral Lover was born out of Gordi thinking about the early stages of those relationships – the hiding and acceptance of a relationship that you want to go further – and “exploded into being” in just three hours.

The music video was shot in Dallas on a boiling 45-degree day. Gordi and writer/director Jared Frieder—who she worked with alongside Troye Sivan on the video for Wait, which was featured in the film Three Months—put a call out to queer men in the area who were up for making out with a total stranger.

“Unsurprisingly, an abundance of people showed up (and all went for drinks together after, bursting my heart open),” Gordi said. “We shot the make-out scenes, by total coincidence, right next to the Future Farmers of America convention (the Venn diagram of the two groups did not exist).”

You can check out the music video below.

Peripheral Lover is the first single from Like Plasticine, which will be released via Mushroom Music on Friday, 30 May. You can pre-order/pre-save the album here.

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The album follows Gordi’s ruminations about her future after working as a frontline healthcare worker during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to an exploration of life, beauty, heartbreak, and humans’ finite existence.

“Being surrounded by death made me think about how beautiful life is,” Gordi said. “I thought about all the ways we are like plasticine in life - how forces we can’t control contort us into shapes, stretch us thin and test our resilience. But sometimes, heart-wrenching change can be a thing of beauty.”

She continued, “On the first page of my notebook - where all the songs from this record are written - I wrote in the top corner ‘inject emotion into everything.’ It was about making the music as undaunted as the stories within it.”