RVNGNL137
Frances Chang
Frances Chang - been thinking bout confession
been thinking bout confession
— Frances Chang’s third studio album and her debut full length for RVNG Intl. been thinking bout confession follows a string of singles released by the label starting with “I can feel the waves”
— Limited edition Translucent Purple and Classic Black vinyl
— Mastered by Sarah Register (Kim Gordon, Black Midi, Faye Webster), the album is pressed on audiophile quality vinyl by RTI
— Each purchase includes a multi-format download redeemable via Bandcamp
RIYL: Cate Le Bon, June McDoom, Cindy Lee, ML Buch, Bill Callahan, Joanne Robertson, Otto Benson
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CAT #: RVNGNL137
Release date: August 21, 2026
been thinking bout confession, the third studio album by musician and producer Frances Chang, is a synth-tinged experimental pop excavation of the self and the vast unknown depths it contains. Largely written on a hundred-year-old baby grand piano, the album situates the unbridled emotion of Chang’s DIY roots within a complex and poetic sonic landscape that interweaves orchestral arrangements with idiosyncratic, almost sculptural, electronic and analog interventions.
Born to immigrant parents in Chicago, Chang’s sonic ethos was formed in the space between spontaneous and recorded auditory encounters. Childhood memories of dancing to her mother playing piano in the living room were as impactful as that of the reflexive shock of hearing her own singing voice recorded for the first time on a My First Sony music toy. An early exposure to film solidified her persistent interest in the narrative and interior qualities of art across all forms, as did an almost desperate thirst for transportive literature. A filmic strain persists in her music, which can sound at times like the score to a psychological thriller or a fantasy epic, and at others, a coming-of-age indie movie.
Chang’s childhood love of medieval RPG series King’s Quest provided an early experience of the digital world’s dislocating capacity to feel vaster than the “real” world. This feeling persists throughout the uncanny valley world-building of been thinking bout confession, which the artist describes as being “sort of a Russian doll of perspective between the digital and the physical.” Disparate early sonic influences like Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” and Jesus Christ Superstar served as cultural touchstones and proof of the boundless capacity of the voice to convey emotion.
Largely self-taught as a musician, Chang’s own voice has an intuitive quality that suggests a sense of a perpetual searching. While Chang’s musical practice grew largely autonomously and bedroom-centered, her formative live experiences took place in underground punk, emo, and post-hardcore scenes in the band giant peach, followed by solo experimental, spoken word and instrumental internet releases under various pseudonyms. 2022’s self-released support your local nihilist, Chang’s first album of songs under her given name, marked a return to a surrealist, more intimate sound, with a stretching and shifting meter; in her 2024 follow-up, Psychedelic Anxiety, time remained elastic, but this time with a drummer and bass player, with whom she soon formed a core live trio. In her early foray into the world of movie music, she has quickly fallen into a niche of composing scores for heady political art films calling for inventive, provocative soundtracks (Sunset Seduction, dir. Charles de Agustin, 2024; Where Can We Be Found? dir. EcoRove, 2023) that dangle melodic threads amid a noisy, drony, musique concrète framework.
Throughout been thinking bout confession, the lines between truth and untruth are blurred as the album’s “protagonist” alternately approaches and retreats from a clearer self-understanding. Floaty, alien vocals can turn crystal-clear and piercing in an instant, just as irreverent electronic arrangements can erupt amidst what began as a straightforward piano ballad. Throughout, this sense of experimentation, dislocation and possibility gives the album an exhilarating, inquisitive edge: like the moon reflecting on the ocean at night, the silvery surface of been thinking bout confession belies its darker depths.
While the Catholic sacrament of confession relies on an interlocutor to receive the confessed sins, the sins being “confessed” on been thinking bout confession are of a more slippery sort. Told not to a priest but to the self, the album is the rare direct encounter with avoidance — we, the listeners, have almost the sense that we are eavesdropping on an intensely personal reckoning. Coalescing her interest in live performance with an unusual ability to conjure up distinctive sonic realms, Chang here operates on two levels: the grand, almost operatic sweeping swell of orchestration and the subcutaneous in-between layers in which things are not so much explained as sensed. Inviting us into the nether regions of the self, been thinking bout confession is at once disconcerting and thrilling.
Though been thinking bout confession is sonically indebted to the extraterrestrial beauty of Bjork and the retrofuturistic dreaminess of Broadcast, Chang also cites less likely influences like Chet Baker, Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach in forming the emotional backbone of the album. For the most part setting aside her usual guitar, Chang wrote these 11 songs on piano, an instrument she refers to as “the feminine root of my psyche.” The album’s uncanny meld of unconventionally deployed spring reverbs, older compressors and tube preamps against a distinctly contemporary digital backdrop forms a listening experience that seems to expand across the past, present and future at once.
been thinking bout confession was recorded between Frances Chang’s home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and the Maspeth, Queens studio of collaborator and album co-producer Andréa Schiavelli (Eyes of Love), who also contributed electric bass and some additional piano playing. Sammy Weissberg arranged the strings heard on throughout performed by a live quartet (Shaleah Feinstein, Sean Lim, Edwin Kaplan and Austin Fisher). William Alexander and Liza Winter contributed drums, while Carolyn Hietter and Jake Tobin played alto and sopranino saxophones on “No avatar.” Sylvia Gorelick voice acted in the closing dialogue of “Marry.”
Throughout the album, the most significant musical presence is Chang’s voice: both pillow-soft and oddly dry. Sitting uncomfortably close to the camera, it’s often the loudest element in the mix. The proximity creates a bizarre depth-of-field, recalling the album’s persistent dialogue with cinema. Here we have not spectacle, but close-ups; not plot, but ethical and philosophical restlessness. The songs move like scenes, quiet reckonings with the friction between inner life and external demand.
What emerges is a coming-of-consciousness film rendered in sound, where Chang’s vocal plays both narrator and witness. Through a steadily-spiraling poeticism, she guides us through a chaotic architecture, clutching a candlelight that is self-deceptive and starkly transparent at the same time.
Frances Chang’s been thinking about confession will be released on August 21, 2026.
Tracklist
LP
Side A (33 RPM)
A1. Bad zen (3:20)
A2. I can feel the waves (6:02)
A3. Is affect real? (4:32)
A4. Marry (5:05)
A5. No avatar (2:21)
Side B (33 RPM)
B1. Midnight in the garden (5:10)
B2. Job’s tears (2:23)
B3. Auratones of Desire (3:31)
B4. That night (2:51)
B5. Prosperity Shrimp (2:35)
B6. Honestly (2:14)
JP CD / DIgital
01. Bad zen
02. I can feel the waves
03. Is affect real?
04. Marry
05. No avatar
06. Midnight in the garden
07. Job’s tears
08. Auratones of Desire
09. That night
10. Prosperity Shrimp
11. Honestly