New Jersey dream pop band San Tropez return to last year’s Museum of Modern History with the slow-burning “Deep and Troubled Place,” featuring Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females and Noun.
One year after the release of Museum of Modern History, San Tropez are returning to the album for a “belated single.” “Deep and Troubled Place” arrives October 2, one day before the first anniversary of the record, giving the New Jersey dream pop band an opportunity to revisit one of the album’s more quietly unsettling tracks.
Built as a slow burn, “Deep and Troubled Place” gradually moves toward a darker and more atmospheric conclusion, punctuated by a guitar solo from Marissa Paternoster of Noun and Screaming Females.
“‘Deep and Troubled Place’ is one of those songs that doesn’t reveal everything right away,” says San Tropez guitarist and vocalist Ralph Nicastro. “It’s a slow burn. It keeps building until it reaches this place that’s a little haunting, and hopefully that feeling stays with you after the song is over.”
Paternoster’s appearance on the track grew naturally out of the recording sessions for Museum of Modern History at Lakehouse Recording Studios in Asbury Park. In addition to her own work as a musician, Paternoster is an engineer and producer at Lakehouse and engineered several of the sessions that eventually became the album.
“Marissa was already part of the world of the record because she had engineered some of the sessions,” drummer Andrew Fountas explains. “When we were working on ‘Deep and Troubled Place,’ we knew there was a space where we would normally put a guitar or keyboard solo, but nothing we were trying felt quite right. Eric Bennett, who was the head engineer on the record, suggested we let Marissa take a shot at it. That turned out to be exactly what the song needed.”
Rather than functioning simply as a guest appearance, Paternoster’s solo becomes part of the song’s gradual transformation, emerging from the atmosphere before pushing the recording toward its final moments.
“What I love is that her guitar doesn’t interrupt the mood of the song—it makes the mood stranger,” says keyboardist Phil Pirri. “By the time it arrives, you feel like the song has taken you somewhere different from where it started.”
The belated single also gets a physical release in a limited run of just 50 lathe-cut 7-inch records, available through the San Tropez Bandcamp page. The B-side extends the Lakehouse connection with a live version of “Reverb Pedal,” recorded during the band’s appearance on the studio’s Lakehouse Live series.
Released October 2 and streaming across all platforms, “Deep and Troubled Place” serves as both a belated single and a fitting one-year marker for Museum of Modern History: a chance to return to a song that, like the album itself, continues to reveal something different with another listen.
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