musclecars have announced the release of their debut album.

Out on 17th May via BBE Music, ‘Sugar Honey Iced Tea!’ sees the NYC duo explore their “wide-reaching sound palette and offer a lens into the Afro-American experience”.  Listen to ‘Running Out Of Time’ and ‘Ha Ya! (Eternal Life)’ below.

The 13-track LP from the duo of Brandon Weems and Craig Handfield – highlighted as one of DJ Mag’s emerging acts to watch back in September 2020 – spans themes including joy, loss, intimacy, helplessness  and perseverance.

“We don’t want to give too much away, but one of our goals is to definitely break out of the ‘House Music’ box that we may have found ourselves in,” the pair said in a press release. “As two artists pulling on the lineage of the Paradise Garage and The Loft, we set out to make an album that was a journey in and of itself.”

They continued: “We are incredibly inspired by many different styles of music, and so we wanted ‘Sugar Honey Iced Tea!’ to be a genre-bending album, devoid of any preconceived notions of what contemporary dance music should sound like.”

musclecars released their debut EP via toucan sounds in 2020, which featured singer Brandon Markell Holmes (who earned a Grammy nomination for his work on Gorillaz’ 2017 album ‘Humanz’). 

They also run the NYC party Coloring Lessons, which is now also a record label and radio show.

Read our feature celebrating Mister Saturday Night: 15 years of New York’s “by us, for us” party, with which musclecars are associated.