Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, the Baltimore duo of Ed Schrader and Devlin Rice, are releasing their new album Nightclub Daydreaming in a couple of weeks. We’ve already heard the tracks “This Thirst,” “Berliner,” and “Echo Base.” And ahead of their tour kickoff today, Ed Schrader is sharing one final single alongside the following personal statement:

In the past few weeks, I’ve made a big decision. I’ve decided to give you the full me. I’ve decided to speak openly about something that I had never spoken to anyone about. The me that I’ve been repressing in hopes of not making other people feel uncomfortable. But that’s not a life—that’s an inhumane purgatory that I am done subjecting myself to.

That said, I have always felt like a woman and my pronouns are they/them.

The stage and the studio have always been a safe space for me, where I can share my deepest struggles, joys and laughs. In your art, you can’t lie. That’s why I have always chosen riddles and cryptic lyrics in my art. I could never lie, but I could disguise the truth.

With ‘Nightclub Daydreaming’ I continued this precedent, essentially telling my autobiography through fictional characters and surreal landscapes. But these are the stories of my fear, my neuroses, my ecstasy and my journey.

The first single off of the record, “This Thirst,” is about the thirst for my true self, and features the first time I ever referred to myself as a woman: “Who will rock you to the fire / Who’s the priestess to ordain?”

On “Black Pearl,” I sing of two lovers disconnected by an ocean, representing the personal dichotamy between my true self and who I was presenting to the world. In retrospect, you can hear the yearning as I sing “I want to see you really…a foreigner, even home now / I shut in vaults to heal you.” I was the foreigner whom no one had ever met, besides my bathroom mirror. When home alone, I would wear women’s clothing, put on makeup, blast M.I.A. and Yelle, and somehow this felt like a crime that no one would ever accept.

You can hear both my euphoria and trepidation on songs like “Berliner.” Deep down, I was beginning to feel my real self emerging in an undeniable way, and I was horrified by it. It felt as if others held the key to my own self worth through their acceptance, or lack thereof.

On “European Moons,” which we release today, I depict myself as a marionette, at the whims of a puppet master forcing me to present a distorted and untrue version of myself. “my posture’s at your strings / too much of coded sighs / I’d like to see you in the night.” It was my true self that I could only see at night.

I have always felt like a woman and, moving forward, I will begin following that path one day at a time. Only the future knows where exactly that path will lead me, but I’m doing it my way. I will no longer only see my true self at night.

Listen to “European Moons” below.

https://twitter.com/ed_schrader/status/1501585161145794573

Nightclub Daydreaming is out 3/25 via Carpark. Pre-order it here.