Brave Baby to release new album May 9

Charleston’s indie-pop champions Brave Baby announced today they’ll release their sophomore album Electric Friends on Sat. May 9 with SUSTO at Charleston Music Hall (37 John St.). Looks like we’ll be starting the summer of 2015 off just right.

The record is the follow-up to the band’s sublime debut, Forty Bells. This time around, the band got out of their head space and spent time writing and recording inside a solar-powered treehouse in Awendaw and at a couple of beach houses on the shores of North Carolina.

The result is what Brave Baby drummer and producer Wolfgang Zimmerman describes as “a riding-to-the-beach-in-a-Jeep-Wrangler kind of vibe.” Whereas Forty Bells had an arena-rock atmosphere, the new record has an “ethereal, cosmic-y, everything’s gonna be all right” feel to it.

Electric Friends also features Zimmerman with more lead vocals than before. “Everyone gets to shine,” he says. And local musician Johnny Delaware collaborated with the band, too. Zimmerman tells us, “He saw the potential on some songs we didn’t see.”

Not just an album-release show, BACE, a local nonprofit dedicated to getting city officials to embrace and cultivate the arts, will host a voter-registration drive that night at the Music Hall. Proceeds from the show will benefit BACE and CHARM, a local organization assisting musicians with healthcare needs.

Tickets are $15, which includes a copy of Electric Friends, and will go on sale Wed. March 18 at 10 a.m.

For more information, go to BACEchs.org or charlestonmusichall.com.