Anthony Family: Live From An Ordinary Place Record Release

Across their two-decade run, Ceremony have been a lot of things. In fact, to harp on the post-punk band’s eclecticism and mutability would dangerously flirt with cliché.

“It’s only noteworthy within the confines of punk. Most bands that have had a long career, with a large body of work, have evolved a lot,” Anthony Anzaldo — Ceremony’s founding guitarist of 20 years, whose record collection would kill him if it fell over — says with a smile. “Listen to Boys Don’t Cry, and then listen to Disintegration. Listen to David Bowie; listen to the Beatles; listen to Barbra f—ing Streisand!”

That being said, Anthony Family — Anzaldo’s radiant new project, where he drives the train — is a left turn for an artist known for them. “What you’re going to hear will be unfamiliar to you at first, if you are a fan of the other things I do,” he says.

Over the years, Ceremony have explored hardcore, post-punk, indie rock, new wave, and beyond. For Anzaldo, in 2024, highly personal, emotionally complex sophisti-pop is the order of the day. And his project’s debut, Live From An Ordinary Place — to be released TK via Pure Noise Records — is a fascinating (re)introduction to Anzaldo as an artist on his own terms.

In tracing Anthony Family’s DNA, if you were to point to Howard Jones, Prefab Sprout, or Yazoo, you’d be on the right track. Ditto the Blue Nile, Scritti Politti — or his all-time hero, Prince. (“I think about him every day in my life,” Anzaldo says of the Purple One. “It’s so beyond that, He doesn’t even consciously register as an influence.”) As for contemporary analogs: think Blood Orange, Perfume Genius, Caroline Polachek, Orville Peck and Fabiana Palladino.

Anzaldo has been writing Anthony Family for years; he had a nascent blueprint for the album in mind for almost a decade. He recorded it over the span of a year, whenever he was able to get in a studio — “until I felt like I had a cohesive body of work that was reflecting where I’m at and how I feel.”

“The process for every tune is different; getting to the destination is always different.” And it’s that destination that matters: the station of the human heart, and Anzaldo’s beats deeper than most. Welcome, and meet the family.

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