Crooked Fingers share new single and video ‘Insomnia’
Crooked Fingers by Jason Thrasher
The nearly 15-year-long wait is almost over: Swet Deth, Eric Bachmann’s first full-length Crooked Fingers album since 2011’s Breaks In the Armor, drops on February 27, 2026. Already declared one of the year’s most anticipated releases by Vulture, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, and other rock tastemakers, today’s final pre-release single, ‘Insomnia’ is accompanied by a Bachmann and Joe Centeno-directed video.
Watch the video for ‘Insomnia’
‘Insomnia’ reveals another facet of Swet Deth’s expanded sonic signature, where Bachmann’s voice and acoustic guitar are animated by his core collaborators, Jeremy Wheatley and Jon Rauhouse. It also pulls back the curtain on the album’s preoccupation with death, sweet and otherwise, a peak Eric Bachmann composition that is at once wry and cathartic, finding one of the great singer-songwriters of his generation grooving past the graveyard.
Speaking on ‘Insomnia’, Eric Bachmann said: "I had a heart attack back in October. Doctor says it partly happened because I didn’t get enough sleep over the years. Insomnia is something I’ve dealt with for as long as I can remember. Feels like if I fall asleep I might miss something. I wrote this song about it. The plucky, winding guitar part that enters after the first verse represents a little venomous snake, dancing in slithers through a pile of unknowing victims slumbering on the beach in the tropical moonlight. I’m in love with the shimmering line of light the moon makes against the ocean when you’re on the beach late at night."
Crooked Fingers - Swet Deth
Cold Waves
From All Ways
Spray Tan Speed Queen (In a German Car)
Insomnia
Empty Love and Cheap Thrills
Haunted
Hospital
(I’m Your) Bodhisattva
Lena
Steady Now
One afternoon, Eric Bachmann’s son returned home from school with a sheath of pictures he’d drawn, all of them macabre. “There were crows and sinister figures with scythes and tombstones,” he recalls, “and in the center, there was a strange, lush green tree growing out of all of this red and black. On one of them, he had written ‘DETH, SWET DETH,’ and everything clicked in my head.” Swet Deth, Bachmann’s first album under his Crooked Fingers moniker after a 15-year hiatus, organised itself around the image: its songs are about death, yes, but there’s a sweetness to them, a wry sensibility to his lyrics that comes from having experienced many kinds of death and the life that follows in its wake.
The drawing, which graces the cover of Swet Deth, tied everything together, a grace note at the end of a long road back to Crooked Fingers. When he sat down to write the album, it was with the intent of making another Eric Bachmann solo record, but the first song - the moody, cathartic slow-burner ‘Hospital’ - not only led to more songs about the end of something, but songs that felt like they belonged to a larger space than the ones he’d cultivated in his post-Crooked Fingers output.
“What I was writing wasn’t mellow like a solo album,” Bachmann says. “It was heavy, and it made me wish that I had a band. So, I hired Jeremy Wheatley to play drums, and I didn’t tell him what to play. In that moment, it became more of a collaboration, more of a band, and it felt natural to call that band Crooked Fingers.”
‘Crooked Fingers’ is a historically slippery concept - no two albums sound alike or feature the same lineup in studio or on tour. Each effort has pulled something new from Bachmann as a songwriter and a bandleader - sharper observations, surprising arrangements - and Swet Deth is no exception. Hearing parts in these songs that called for instruments he didn’t play or vocals that weren’t in his register, he found himself expanding the roster of guest musicians further than he had on any album in his catalogue, including Sharon Van Etten (‘Haunted’), The National’s Matt Berninger (‘From All Ways’), and Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan (‘Cold Waves’).
“I’m introverted, I’m shy, and I don’t want to waste anybody’s time,” Bachmann notes, “so it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. I had to follow the sound - the way a bassline drove through a song or the way a lyric would sound in another voice - and break through some of my own barriers to make it happen.” He started with family, friends, and frequent collaborators. Jon Rauhouse plays pedal steel. Bachmann’s wife, Liz Durrett, who first joined Crooked Fingers for 2011’s Breaks in the Armor, contributes vocals on ‘Hospital,’ as do members of his touring band, Skylar Gudasz (‘Spray Tan Speed Queen (In A German Car)’ and ‘(I’m Your) Bodhisattva’) and Avery Leigh Draut (‘Empty Love and Cheap Thrills’).
Berninger’s turn on ‘From All Ways’ was crucial to Bachmann’s creative process. Sending songs from the then in-progress Swet Deth and Get Sunk back and forth, Berninger heard the chorus - the calm, rational response to the wounded, self-sabotaging line running through the verses - and asked if he could sing them. It’s a boon to the song - Berninger’s cool, measured intonation is a counterbalance to the quiet strain in Bachmann’s voice as he rifles through his insecurities - but it almost didn’t happen. “I was excited, and I was grateful, and he was right: his voice is perfect for that moment,” he says. “But I said I didn’t want to ask because he was busy with his own things - again, some of that shyness - and what he told me is so simple in retrospect, basically that it’s always okay to ask, that the worst thing that could come from asking someone onto a song was that they couldn’t do it, and that opened the album up tremendously.”
It was Berninger who suggested that Mac McCaughan sing on lead single ‘Cold Waves’, the Beatlesque brightness of his harmony with Bachmann immediately establishing the tone he’d set out to find on Swet Deth, a song about the purgatory of a relationship in conflict that hits like a summertime rock staple. When he wrote ‘Haunted’, a propulsive, synth-forward sonic left-turn from Bachmann’s more straightforward rock and acoustic ballad arrangements, the voice he heard singing with his was Sharon Van Etten’s, her take sharpening the emotional resonance of Bachmann’s self-excoriating lyric while giving the track an ascendant, danceable energy.
These features find Bachmann challenging himself to break down personal and creative boundaries, to be vulnerable and open with himself in a way few of his projects - even Crooked Fingers - have allowed for in the past. Pared down to himself, Wheatley, and Rauhouse, as on ‘Insomnia’, one hears more than just the theme of Swet Deth clicking into place. There is a freedom to this collection of songs, a groove to them that would belie their agonies and anxieties were mere death the album’s point and not what comes before. For Eric Bachmann, that has been growth, as a musician and as a man. Like the tree sprouting from the graveyard on its cover, Swet Deth is surprising and lush, a shock of color against its morbid landscape, proof of life in the shadow of its opposite. “RIP Eric Bachmann,” one tombstone reads. As Crooked Fingers, he’s never felt more alive.
