“Walking at a Downtown Pace” by Parquet Courts

"Walking at a Downtown Pace" was one of the singles Parquet Courts sent out ahead of Sympathy for Life, their seventh studio album, which Rough Trade released in October 2021. It came from a band in the middle of a turn: after the long road behind Wide Awake!, co-frontmen Austin Brown and Andrew Savage had fallen hard for dance and techno and grown tired of what people expect a rock band to do.

So the record was built from long improvised jams, most of them cut before the pandemic, then hammered into songs with club nights and nightlife running through them. Rodaidh McDonald produced this one, Evan Sutton engineered it, and Brown mixed it alongside McDonald, a sign of how closely the band kept its hands on the sound.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.