Count Zero

Count Zero is an innovative Boston band that mixes electronics, acoustic grit, strong melodies, intriguing arrangements and creative lyrics into an intense, eclectic stew of musical experimentation... and it's catchy too. It's Future Pop for the disenchanted.

History: When a band exists in its own realm, things like timelines and chronology only serve to please the outside world. What stirs loudest within a blurred cauldron of the past, present, and future is the music, dangling overhead like a specter, reminding us both of what was and what is right now. For most bands, releasing a new album after 13 years would be seen as a sort of comeback or rebirth. For Count Zero, the genre-straddling Boston alternative band that always sounded like the future while reveling strictly in a moment of insular grandeur, the promise of a new album is just simply what we’ve been expecting all along.
And now we have tangible proof that we are firmly in that right here and right now. Count Zero is set to unveil its fifth studio album, a theatrical 10-track odyssey titled thought so, on Friday, November 8, with a release party that later night at Sonia is Cambridge. The show is presented by BumbleBee Radio and features musical kindred spirits and fellow scene veterans Lovina Falls and Singer Mali.
Ahead of the album, a new Count Zero single titled “Overthinking” crashes the streams on October 11. The magnetic track with a gentle stomp not only serves as an aural appetizer to the album, but also proves the ambitious glam and art-rock stylings of band composer and ringleader Peter Moore have never really faded over its nearly three-decade career, when Count Zero first emerged from the ashes of cult electronic band Think Tree.
“Our music has always been dense – occasionally one might argue too dense,” Moore muses from his home studio. “Now we're learning to trust sparseness and space more, trusting the hooks, the vibes, the grooves.”
The awaited follow-up to 2011’s Never Be Yourself, thought so finds Count Zero as its most assured, no small accomplishment given the confidence the band weaponized to swerve around most of the pitfalls and landmines of the Boston rock scene. And in a weird way, the dystopia of the world around us has finally caught up to the cacotopia weaved delicately within the Count Zero sound for so long.
Since forming in 1996, and along the way employing the likes of Amanda Palmer (whose Dresden Dolls once took the band out on a six-week tour), Elizabeth Steen of Natalie Merchant’s band, and Throwing Muses’ Bernard Georges, Moore and longtime collaborator and confidant Will Ragano have carefully existed in familiar and unfamiliar lanes. With Thought So, those lanes have not only widened, but merged.
When Moore was not touring as lead vocalist for the Blue Man Group’s “How To Be A Megastar” tour, Count Zero could be found on various live stages across the city, on playlists and rotations from the long-gone local radio and media monoliths, and across digital screens around the world, where the band’s more riff-led tracks were played by countless would-be rock and rollers in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games (and as a result, 2011’s “Radium Eyes” is approaching a cool 1 million plays on Spotify).