In the summer of 2024, Cut Worms – aka Max Clarke – found himself opening for Wilco on their Tour to Infinity run across North America. A full-circle moment for Clarke, who’d long admired the band, that experience extended further than the stage, and by the end of the run, admiration had turned into an invitation and legendary frontman Jeff Tweedy asked Clarke to come back to Wilco’s storied Loft studio in Chicago to record his new record, Transmitter.

The serendipity felt personal as well as professional. Chicago is where Clarke went to art school, played in early bands, and first began recording under the Cut Worms name. Returning to the city as an established musician – with a new batch of songs and Tweedy behind the board – gave Transmitter, his fourth album, a sense of homecoming which scaffolds the narrative.

Across the record, Clarke rides the adrenaline of being swept up in the world, only to find solace in insular spaces. Rush and retreat. “The stories in these songs are equal parts innocence and experience,” says Clarke, “dealing with the ecstatic moments of being freshly enamoured with the world as well as the isolation and seclusion that can come after.” Through his clear-eyed melodies and open-hearted lyrics, worlds are compared and contrasted: the private sanctum of the home rubs up against the bizarre theatre of American individualism, where everyone is broadcasting and few are really heard, via the expansive cosmos transmissions of Carl Sagan. 

To mark the album’s release, here Clarke reflects on five influences that shaped its frequency, from Don DeLillo’s compelling dissections of modern life to Carl Sagan’s encoded messages from deep space. Together, they form faint transmissions beneath the surface of an album tuned to beauty and static.

The Writings of Don DeLillo

“I tend to have about three or four books going at once, and one of them is often a DeLillo. I think he’s one of the greatest living artists in any medium. I don’t know of any other writer can make a sentence feel like a lightning bolt quite the way he can, particularly in regard to life in (post)modern America. The way hyper consumerism lives alongside cruelty, violence, destruction and labyrinthian bureaucracy and conspiracy, but how it’s all very matter-of-fact and ordinary to people. There’s a kind of sick beauty to it. It’s also one of the great examples of the strange, mysterious relationship that art has to real life. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of art imitating life imitating art (ad infinitum), read the novel White Noise, then look up the train derailment disaster that happened in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023, and is doubtless still unfolding.”

“I think [Don DeLillo] is one of the greatest living artists in any medium. I don’t know of any other writer can make a sentence feel like a lightning bolt quite the way he can”

Contact by Carl Sagan

“My friend Joe (who is now playing guitar in Cut Worms) lent me this book years ago and I never got around to it until recently. I’ve loved Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series for a long time and I always find him to be an inspiration, but this novel particularly got to me. In it, Earth receives a message from a distant star system, which has been encoded in an old television broadcast (from Earth). This got me thinking about transmissions; they talk about the signal as a palimpsest, which is like an old scroll that’s been written over countless times and traces of the old messages are still there, faintly. I had the thought: that’s what songs are, kind of. That’s where I got Transmitter.”

Mark Mulcahy

“I was listening to a lot of Miracle Legion and Polaris over the past couple years. There’s a built-in nostalgia there, having grown up watching Pete & Pete and all those other great weird early Nickelodeon shows and cartoons. But it’s much more than that really… the songs are so great. There’s this feeling of suburban wildness and bliss, but with an undercurrent of some strange subtle horror or loneliness you can’t quite put your finger on. Mulcahy is so great at that. He also lives in Western Massachusetts, which is where my longtime friend and drummer Noah lives. Noah co-wrote the song Worlds Unknown with me, which is one of my favourites on the record, so it seems like there’s also some kind of thread there.”

“We opened for Dwight Twilley at The Empty Bottle, which is a point of honour for me even though I was drunk and his wife tried to have me kicked out of the bar for some reason I can’t recall.”

Paul Westerberg / The Replacements

“Great songs, master lyricist. A fellow midwesterner. I don’t know if they drink quite as heavily in Cleveland as in Minnesota, but I’d wager it’s pretty close. This music seems to sink into me more and more the older I get. There’s a sense of something being missed in a lot of it. Bitterness and disappointment, but it’s not necessarily sad, it’s kind of joyous in its bitterness and disappointment. He’s really good at doing the thing of turning something inside out or back onto itself.”

Dwight Twilley

“Years ago, before Cut Worms, I was in a band in Chicago called The Sueves, and we opened for Dwight Twilley at The Empty Bottle, which is a point of honour for me even though I was drunk and his wife tried to have me kicked out of the bar for some reason I can’t recall. I’m almost certain I didn’t do anything. I wish I had tried harder to meet him and talk to him. He put on a great show. For anyone who doesn’t know, Dwight Twilley is a kind of Demigod of Powerpop and he made some truly great songs and recordings. I’ve been listening to his records quite a lot over the past couple of years, especially after he sadly passed in 2023. He’s one who I think never really fully got his due the way he should have. He’s also from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I have family and have visited often in my life, so, another thread…”

Cut Worms: Transmitter is out via Jagjaguwar on 13th March.