26/03/2025

The Mayflies USA – Less Lost: 13th Floor New Song Of The Day

Today, power pop cult favorites The Mayflies USA share “Less Lost,” the third single from Kickless Kids, their first new album in 23 years, out May 16 release on Yep Roc Records.

Of the song, the band says: “Less Lost” is about that feeling of displacement and rootlessness and the yearning we often felt to return home to Carrboro. Appropriately enough, it’s the only song on Kickless Kids featuring our beloved original drummer, David Liesegang.”

The third single follows the single/video for “Calling The Bad Ones Home,” hailed by Brooklyn Vegan as “a lovely two-minute power-pop earworm. They haven’t lost their touch,” and the single/video for “Thought The Rain Was Gone,” written about “alienation and disconnection.”

Produced, recorded, and mixed by Tim Harper, longtime sound engineer for North Carolina’s The Connells, Kickless Kicks delivers a catchy 12-song collection of melodic classic alt-pop, a Mayflies hallmark going back three decades to their earliest days at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. “We got these songs down so organically,” says bassist and singer Adam Price, “it never felt like we were trying to get the final album version of anything. We just got a good version here, a good track there, an overdub here, a remix there, and the album slowly started to come into focus. It’s the way you hear about bands we love making records in the sixties and seventies, this slow, accretive process—a labor of love.”

Following a few one-off reunion shows over the last 10 years, the Chapel Hill-based Mayflies USA—Matt McMichaels, Matt Long, Adam Price, and new member Tony Stiglitz—decided to record their fourth full-length album after a mysterious illness struck guitarist Matt Long in 2022. “He had his whole system go insane, to the point that the doctors said he’d have been gone in a week had he not come in,” says guitarist and singer Matt McMichaels. “After he got out of the hospital, he told us, ‘I really want to record with you guys again.’ It brought into stark relief that we may not have as much time as we thought. We’re all getting older, so it’s now or never.”

Formed in 1996, in the afterglow of the Chapel Hill indie rock scene that introduced bands like the Archers of Loaf and Polvo to the world, The Mayflies USA’s first three albums garnered wide critical acclaim. For their early albums, they connected with producer Chris Stamey from North Carolina legends The dB’s and the unofficial “Fifth Mayfly”–Stamey reprises his latter role on Kickless Kids with post-production additions to several tracks. After logging 350 shows in six years of touring and no commercial breakthrough, the band disbanded in 2002.

“We all went off and did our thing,” says McMichaels. “Adam’s an acclaimed novelist; Matt Long became the Rolling Stones’ production assistant and learned a lot about guitar just being in Keith Richards’ orbit; and I really had to step up playing with Chris in his Big Star thing [Matt plays in Chris Stamey’s long-running Big Star tribute ensemble]. In the old days we might have sounded like the Raspberries, but we were living a lot more like The Replacements, almost feral. But we’ve all learned how to actually play since then. I think we’re a really good rock band now.”