Lou Barlow and John Davis are the Folk Implosion, and they are releasing a new album of the music they made for Larry Clark and Harmony Korine’s 1995 film, Kids. The album, Music for Kids, is out September 8 via Domino. The record opens with “Natural One”—the iconic song that the band made for the Kids soundtrack—and also includes Unkle’s remix of the track. Below, check out the a remastered version of the original, the remix, and a new live performance of “Natural One.”
Although it does not appear in the film, “Natural One” was the biggest song on the soundtrack—and of Barlow’s career—peaking at No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100. Music for Kids comprises newly remastered versions of all the songs the duo wrote for the movie, including B-sides and previously unreleased tracks. Barlow and Davis recorded it at Fort Apache Studios in Boston with in-house engineer Wally Gagel.
“We turned the studio into the proverbial ‘playground of the mind,’” Davis said in a statement. “We went digging through Fort Apache for whatever we could find; we scoured the studio looking for instruments like bongos, vibraslap, a lot of percussion instruments… saxophone, oscillator, Juno synthesizer. We used the Mellotron they had for ‘Wet Stuff,’ ‘Daddy Never Understood,’ and ‘Crash.’ We even recorded a push broom being dragged across a board of plywood.”
The Folk Implosion reemerged after a 19-year hiatus last year with the single “Feel It If You Feel It.” Their last LP was 2003’s The New Folk Implosion. Barlow’s band Sebadoh released Act Surprised in 2019.
Revisit 2017’s “Director Harmony Korine on the Extremely Weird Music That Made Him.”
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Music for Kids:
01 Natural One
02 Nothing Gonna Stop
03 Wet Stuff
04 Jenny’s Theme
05 Crash
06 Daddy Never Understood
07 Simean Groove
08 Nasa Theme
09 Cabride
10 Raise the Bells
11 Insinuation
12 Burning Paper
13 Checking In
14 Wide Web
15 Park Dub
16 Natural One (Unkle Remix)
17 Nothing Gonna Stop (Instrumental)
18 Insinuation (Dust Brothers Remix)