Grey Romantic is not the first album that The Shivers have dropped on Valentine’s Day. Honestly, they all could have. NYC singer-songwriter Keith Zarriello, backed by his rotating cast of friends and fellow musicians, has a deep catalogue of material exploring love and loss from ever sharper angles. 2015’s Forever Is A Word also saw a Valentine’s unveiling, but any of The Shivers more than half a dozen full-lengths could have born witness to the day as love letters either to stuff into bottles and hurl into the sea or to light as kindling and burn it all down.Judging from the reaction to The Shivers’ earliest breakout single, 2004’s “Beauty” — which was the impetus for the band’s cult following of people like Aaron Paul, Daniel Radcliffe, Rose McIver, Tessa Thompson and bands like Deer Tick and Foster the People — Zarriello is impressively skilled at describing love.Grey Romantic is the latest proof that he’s equally capable of depicting love’s aftermath and charred wreckage, as the album leans heavily to the heartbroken side. The Guardian’s Laura Barton testified to The Shivers’ already impressive ability to capture the pain, as she remarked on the 2011 album More, “It’s a breakup album, a song cycle of sorts, that moves through the collapse of a relationship and on to regret, defiance, the hope of reunion and, finally, resignation…It’s a mainstay of my record collection.”Grey Romantic, true to form, is a frank and beautiful record on isolation, brutal and honest. Zarriello revealed about the album, “It’s all about human loneliness. I like the term cosmic loneliness.“ Zarriello’s output cycles through searing love and cold loneliness, mirroring life’s familiar pattern. He explained last year in an interview with Motif RI, “My songs are divided up into albums, but I guess I tend to look at the whole body of work as one unbroken line.”The Scotsman noted as much in 2011: “A particularly interesting part of his songwriting is that he carries lyric and melodic motifs across songs and even entire albums…Mining the pain of isolation and lost love for art isn’t a new concept, but Zarriello has been finding new ways to explore it for over a decade.”The Shivers’ forthcoming full-length Grey Romantic is due out on February 14th. Its creation, as the story goes, started in November of 2015 when Keith Zarriello left Queens after years in NYC real estate, disillusioned and reeling from a breakup, packed some recording equipment and personal belongings into a rented cargo van and drove 2500 miles to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico to a small shack where he lived and wrote the bulk of Grey Romantic in isolation.The album was then recorded first in an old warehouse in Downtown L.A. across the hallway from studio space that belonged to The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, and later re-recorded in an old converted cabin in the Catskill Mountains.Recorded between 12/15-12/16creditsreleases February 14, 2017 Tracks 1, 3 and 8 recorded and produced by Wade Ryff at Studio 57 - Downtown LA Track 2 mixed by Niko Bolas and Wade Ryff w/ additional recording on tracks 1, 3 by Luke Top at Palmetto Recording, Downtown LA Tracks 1, 3 and 8 mixed by Ben Talmi at Greylock Studios, Brooklyn, NY Tracks 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 recorded, produced and mixed (except track 2) by Keith Zarriello Musicians: Wade Ryff: Bass on tracks 1, 2, 3 and 8 Matt LaRocca: guitar on tracks 1 and 8 Kyle Crane: Drums on tracks 1 and 3