Strange Pains, the project of Boston-born songwriter Ted Bradley, have announced their debut album ‘The Diamond District I’, out October 16. It is the first half of a double album, with the second part due sometime in 2027.

The first song from it is ‘Lucifer Disguised’, which Bradley began writing the morning after moving to Providence. He had spent the previous night at AS220 watching the reunion of There Were Wires and was walking home with rather more than the show itself on his mind.

“I started writing it the morning after I moved to Providence, with my head rattling,” he says. “I’d gone to see the There Were Wires reunion at AS220 the night before, and on the walk home I was thinking about identity and the way it accumulates and sheds. And how sometimes you don’t relate to yourself.”

It is a good place for a song to begin. Bradley writes in the second person throughout, partly because the thought he was following already seemed to have placed some distance between himself and the person being described.

“There’s something funny and unsettling about that,” he says. “It felt natural to explore the idea in the second person, and I left it that way in the end.”

‘Lucifer Disguised’ has a fair amount of fuzz about it, but the melody is never buried. That seems to be one of the useful contradictions in Strange Pains: Bradley clearly likes guitars when they get a little unruly, though he is just as interested in the song underneath them.

He has been working on ‘The Diamond District’ for six years, writing across Somerville, Brooklyn and Providence. The record was produced, engineered and mixed by Joseph D’Agostino of Cymbals Eat Guitars and Empty Country.

Before Strange Pains, Bradley played in Age Rings and Philosophical Zombie, touring nationally and appearing at SXSW. The new project takes its name from ‘Strange Pains’ by Boston band The Lot Six, though Bradley’s own songs have gradually moved away from straightforward autobiography. He seems more interested now in the bits of memory that refuse to behave themselves, and in how differently the same event can look depending on where you happen to be standing years later.

That makes a double album a fairly natural place for him to have ended up.

Headline credit: Matt Cosby

Strange Pains