Paz Lenchantin, who played bass in the Pixies between 2014 and 2024 following stints in Zwan and A Perfect Circle, is re-launching her solo career with the upcoming LP Triste. The album arrives October 17, and she’s just dropped leadoff single “Hang Tough” along with a video.
“I had to make this record on my own,” Lenchantin says in a statement, “not to prove anything, but just to have faith that music can nurture me back. And it did.”
Lenchantin created much of the music on Triste herself, but she did recruit two of her former Perfect Circle bandmates — drummer Josh Freese and guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen — to join her in the studio. She was also accompanied by Spanish-speaking musicians she met after posting a notice on Instagram.
The album began to take shape last year in Petatlán, Mexico, when Lenchantin wrote a series of songs about a young woman falling in love with Jesus. “Lenchantin isn’t necessarily religious,” reads an official album bio, “she saw the story as a metaphor for salvation: the human drive to search for a god, or god-like figure, and to devote yourself to something that cannot love you back…This guiding metaphor shaped the album’s dream-like logic, with each lyric refracting a fragment of Lenchantin’s own life into broader analogy.”
“What was special to me in making this album was that I learned who I am, this far into my journey in music, simply by allowing myself the freedom of my own choice,” Lenchantin said. “It became like witnessing a fallen tree in my own forest, without the need to yell ‘timber.’”
The music is a vast departure from her work with the Pixies. She joined the alt-rock icons in 2014 after the group parted ways with bassist Kim Shattuck. “Charles [Thompson, a.k.a. Black Francis] is the greatest artist I’ve ever worked with,” she told Rolling Stone in 2022 as part of our Unknown Legends interview series. “I used to be like, ‘This is missing in this band, and this is missing in this band…’ But working with Charles, Joey [Santiago], and David [Lovering] really glued me together and completed me in every way I was looking for. It really is the peak of the mountain.”
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In 2024, after recording three albums with them and touring the world many times over, the Pixies announced that they were parting ways with her. “My departure is a bit of a surprise to me as it is to many,” Lenchantin told Rolling Stone when the news broke, “but it looks like they have a solid plan figured out, which in turn has pushed me to move onwards onto new projects that I am excited about.”
Not long afterward, a “major artist” asked Lenchantin if she’d join her band as a bass player. “I froze,” she says in the album bio, stating that her past experiences in high-profile groups left her “traumatized.” “And how far can that get you?” she asks, noting that she turned down the gig in favor of creating Triste. “Otherwise,” she said, “you’re just going around in a circle.”
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The Triste track list:
1 – Novela
2 – Lows & Highs
3 – Woman Of Nazareth
4 – Hang Tough
5 – Wish I Was There
6 – Si No!
7 – In The Garden With The Devil
8 – Adam
9 – Lucia
10 – Sin Dios
11 – Save It For Hell
12 – Triste
