Sub Pop

Death Jokes II is the final work of the acclaimed Amen Dunes project. 

This is the last chapter of the final volume. Goodbye, I've barely said a word to you, but it's always like that at parties - we never really see each other, we never say the things we should like to; in fact it's the same everywhere in this life. Let's hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged.

Amen Dunes was founded in 2006 with D.I.A., an album he recorded on an 8-track recorder in a trailer in Upstate New York. It grew from there, with McMahon releasing 6 full-length albums and 2 EPs over the last 18 years. Today he releases the 7th and final album, Death Jokes II, a reworked version of his May 2024 Sub Pop debut, Death Jokes. Hailed as “a daring turn in a different direction” by NPR Music, “a testament to McMahon’s sheer artistic brilliance” by Stereogum, and “a body of musical work that’s often as confounding as it is brilliant” by GQ, Death Jokes marked a major departure from Amen Dunes’ previous output, an ambitious album that saw McMahon immerse himself in the electronic music he grew up with but never imagined himself able to make.

Death Jokes was a complex project that took close to four years to complete and was recorded in various iterations, including an alternate version of the album recorded in June of 2021 at the famed East West Studios in Los Angeles (in the "Pet Sounds" and the haunted "Whitney Houston" rooms)  with Money Mark (Beastie Boys) on keyboards, and both Jim Keltner (Bob Dylan et. al) and Carla Azar (Autolux) on drums.

In reimagining the album as Death Jokes II, McMahon revisited all that material for stripped down remixes of the songs by Craig Silvey. These new mixes also include unheard contributions from notable Death Jokes contributors Panoram, Kwake Bass (Dean Blunt, MF DOOM), Christoffer Berg (Fever Ray), and Robbie Lee, a multi-instrumentalist and NYC veteran.

Death Jokes II is a celebration of endings and of deaths, marking the end of Amen Dunes, itself.