I pre-ordered the new Seth Bogart album from the Wacky Wacko store several months ago and had completely forgot about it by the time it arrived on my doorstep this week. I was surprised, then, to (re)disover that the album’s title overlapped thematically with our current Movie of the Month selection, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It was also officially released on director Pedro Almodóvar’s birthday, something neither Bogart nor the Swampflix crew consciously intended to celebrate. That’s some beautiful happenstance.

Men on the Verge of Nothing is Bogart’s second album as a solo artist, following his self-titled debut in 2016. Ironically, his debut was much more closely aligned with the candy-coated pop art aesthetics of Almodóvar’s classic screwball comedy. This new record is more downbeat & despondent, practically reaching for the sleeping pills-laced gazpacho just to put an end to it all. It turns out the existential turn of phrase in the title is totally appropriate to how his music’s mood has soured (an understandable reaction to the ways the world has degenerated in the four years since the previous record). Still, you can feel a continued kinship with Almodóvar’s love for women, queerness, and artifice in all of Bogart’s work, whether or not it’s specific to the tone of Women on the Verge in particular.

Check out the video for the album’s single “Boys Who Don’t Wanna Be Boys” below (featuring appearances from other loveable L.A. weirdos like Tammie Brown, Peggy Noland, and Kate Berlant). If nothing else, it shares a strong cut-and-paste magazine collage aesthetic that appears throughout Almodóvar’s work, Women on the Verge included.

For more on September’s Movie of the Month, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and our podcast discussion of Pedro Almodóvar’s greatest hits.

-Brandon Ledet