Planes Mistaken For Stars (Photo: Angela Owens)

“All these songs were just little globules floating around in my head for the past 10 years,” Gared O’ Donnell says when asked why his band, Planes Mistaken For Stars, made Prey, its fourth album and first since 2006’s Mercy. Planes split in 2007, though it only took three years for the band to start playing shows again. Rumors of new music began to swirl shortly thereafter, and on October 21 Deathwish Inc. will release Prey, which was produced by Sanford Parker and boasts an appropriately rock ‘n’ roll backstory .


Before recording the album, O’Donnell left his home of Peoria, Illinois in hopes of hunkering down somewhere a little more exciting. As he puts it, “I just felt like I needed to do some sort of pre-midlife crisis bullshit.” The town of O’Donnell’s dreams never materialized, so he settled on Waukegan, Illinois, just a couple hundred miles north of where he lives. “I wound up in a fucking Motel 6 trying to start fistfights with truck drivers,” said O’Donnell, “I learned a lot about myself and what makes me happy, and what makes me happy is not being by myself in the middle of fucking Waukegan, Illinois in a strip mall hotel.”

The A.V. Club is premiering the first song from Prey, the paradoxically-titled “Fucking Tenderness.” It’s a song that recalls the band’s golden era, finding the space between classic rock, stoner metal, and discordant hardcore where Planes always excelled. Asked why it was selected as Prey’s lead single, O’Donnell shoots straight. “If you want a generic answer, it’s got a hook,” he says, adding that, “it’s straight-up Thin Lizzy worship.” In our short conversation about Prey, he makes no attempt to push the record, claiming that “it’s patronizing” to do so, and that it will find whatever audience needs it. O’Donnell sums up Planes’ entire ethos in a couple simple declarations: “You don’t sell something you love. You fucking own it.”


Pre-orders for Prey are available now through Deathwish Inc., and Planes Mistaken For Stars’ tour dates can be found below.


Prey tracklist

1. Dementia Americana

2. Til’ It Clicks

3. Riot Season

4. Fucking Tenderness

5. She Who Steps

6. Clean Up Mean

7. Black Rabbit

8. Pan In Flames

9. Enemy Blinds

10. Alabaster Cello


Planes Mistaken For Stars tour dates

10/26—Township—Chicago, IL

10/27—Northside Yacht Club—Cincinnati, OH

10/28—Dollhouse Productions—Savannah, GA

10/30—The Wooly—Gainesville, FL

10/31—Masquerade—Atlanta, GA

11/1—The End—Nashville, TN

11/2—Fubar—St. Louis, MO

11/3—89th Street Collective—Oklahoma City, OK

11/4—Sound On Sound Fest—Austin, TX