One chord – that’s all it takes. Play it long and hard, flip it over and pull it apart, drag it through the gravel and mud, and you’ve got rock ’n’ roll. This is its danger and mystery – its promise. The Archive believes in this. But they’re not trying to strip the music down, throw pieces of it away, or hollow anything out. They’re not trying to go back to anything. The band is after a new kind of psychedelia – an East Coast psychedelia – one dedicated to the notion that Appalachian folk music was the original one-chord rock ‘n’ roll, the first head trip. That you can turn the guitars loud, drench the room in reverb, and transform those Southern mountain melodies into something strange and wonderful – something barely recognizable. That the difference between Gillian Welch and U2 isn’t as great as we might have supposed.

The Archive's debut record, "Great Low Down" - which includes the singles "Awake and Wait" and "Disarm" - is due out in the fall. The album was recorded last spring and summer in Manhattan’s Mavericks Studios with co-producer Bobby Lurie (The Billy Nayer Show), engineer Allen Farmelo (Talk Normal, Wilco's Mikael Jorgensen), and Tom Waits' longtime engineer/producer Karl Derfler. The record was mastered in Iceland by Valgeir Sigurðsson, who's worked with Bjork and Bonnie "Prince" Billy.