Real Estate’s Martin Courtney announces solo album, ‘Magic Sign’

Sinna Nasseri

Martin Courtney, frontman of Real Estate, has announced his second solo album. On June 24, he’ll release Magic Sign via Domino. The first single is “Corncob,” and you can check out its video below, co-directed by Bráulio Amado & Antonio Vicentini.

Courtney says in a press release, “The lyrics are about a specific time, the end of youth, pre-adulthood, scummy kid hanging around your hometown a little too long, smoking weed and driving around the surrounding area with your friends to get as completely lost as possible. Eventually getting home using these little green signs that are posted throughout the NJ suburbs telling you which way to go to reach different towns. We called them magic signs.

You do this enough times and it eventually gets harder and harder to get lost. A song about pushing the boundaries of where you grew up until you exhaust the mystery and hit a different kind of boundary. A song about aimless kids looking for direction.”