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A hook, not an announcement
Announcing a release gives you one post and then silence. A story gives you ten. How to find your hook in your own archive, and how to tell it so that every time it sounds like something else.
Every band knows the moment. The recording is finished, the date is set, and you sit down to write the first post. What comes out is a sentence saying we have a new single, out on such and such a day. You post it, friends like it, and two days later you have nothing left to say.
This is a real problem, not laziness. A release announcement is a one off piece of information. You can repeat it twice, maybe three times, before it starts to grate, and there are four weeks until the release that have to be filled with something.
The fix is both banal and hard: you need a story, not a piece of information. Something you can tell from five different sides, that sounds different every time while leading to the same place.
The story is in your archive, not in the recording
The first instinct is to look for the hook inside the song. What the lyrics are about, how the riff came together, what happened in the studio. That sometimes works, but it usually ends up as an instruction manual: first we tracked drums, then guitars. Nobody is moved by that, including you.
Much better material is sitting in what came before.
Ours turned up by accident. We were going through old press clippings from a previous band and found a review from well over a decade ago. The writer said something along the lines of: interesting, full of ideas, you can hear it live, and if a record ever comes out of this and somebody competent helps them, it will turn out well.
That is a condition set more than a decade ago. Today the record exists, and the help that writer was talking about turned up too. Suddenly we do not have an announcement, we have a closed loop with a beginning, a condition and a punchline. You can tell that story to a journalist, to a fan and to a complete stranger, and it holds every time.
Go looking in your own. Old reviews, old previews, a line from someone who believed in you back then or pointedly did not. An unrealised plan from years ago. An instrument that came back into the line up after a decade. The reason your band is called what it is called, if that reason is funny or awkward.
A good hook has one quality: you can tell it to someone at a table and they ask a question. If your sentence is followed by silence and a polite nod, it is not a hook.
One story, ten different ways in
Once you have it, the part that actually fills a calendar begins. The idea is to cast the same line every time, but from a different bank.
From that single old review you can make a post about what did not work back then. A post about what changed in the line up. A photograph of the clipping. A question asking people whether they remember that band. A message to the writer himself, written plainly, reminding him of his own words. Each of those is about something else, and each of them ends in the same place, at the link to the recording.
That is the difference between we have a new song repeated eight times and eight different things that say the same thing.
It works the other way round as well, when you write to specific people. When you have a story, you also have a reason to write to someone who is part of it. The person who once wrote about you. The club where you played your first show. The person who recorded your demo. Those are not cold messages, they are the continuation of a conversation from years ago, and people answer them completely differently.
What not to do
Two things we tested on ourselves.
Do not build a hook on a memory you cannot be sure the other person shares. We played together back in 2009, remember? is risky, because they may well not remember, and then you are left holding a sentence that puts someone in an awkward position. A fact from a newspaper is safer than a fact from somebody's head, because the newspaper can be shown.
And do not overdo it in the other direction. If you are unsure of a detail, say that you are unsure. I think it was in such and such a magazine, but I would not swear to it reads better than a confident shot at the wrong title. Industry people spot that instantly, and that one slip sets the tone for the rest of your message.
If you have no story
Sometimes there simply is not one, because the band started a year ago and nothing has happened yet. In that case, what is left is doing something that becomes a story.
Play your first show somewhere with a history of its own. Record a track in an unusual room and show the room. Bring somebody into the session who does not fit. This is not about inventing legends. It is about having something to talk about at the next release besides the date.
Because a date is information. And information is good for exactly one post.
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