Squid have share the first single, “Swing (In A Dream)”, off their upcoming album “O Monolith” out June 9th via Warp.
TRACKLIST:
1. Swing (In a Dream) 2. Devil’s Den 3. Siphon Song 4. Undergrowth 5. The Blades 6. After The Flash 7. Green Light 8. If You Had Seen The Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away
The vet deo for the album opener was directed by Yoonha Park. This is what Yoonha said about the video: “I was interested in exploring visual ideas from Where’s Waldo, Richard Scarry, and Brueghel as a means to express anxieties about the climate crisis.”
Louis Borlase said this about the album: “There’s a running theme of the relation of people to the environment throughout. There are allusions to the world we became so immersed in, environmental emergency, the role of domesticity, and the displacement you feel when you’re away for a long time.”
The band has announced a UK/European tour in support of the album. No USofA (nor Tijuana) dates have been announced yet.
Keaton Henson has shared the first single, “Envy”, off his new upcoming album “House Party” out June 9th via PIAS.
TRACKLIST:
1. I’m Not There 2. Rain In My Favourite House 3. Envy 4. The Meeting Place 5. Two Bad Teeth 6. Stay 7. Late To You 8. Parking Lot 9. Holiday 10. The Mine 12. Hooray 13. Hide Those Feelings
Keaton said this about the song: “Everything these days is so performative and aspirational, and we all seem to live in envy of people and lives that aren’t ours and we’re convinced would solve all our problems and feelings of emptiness. It’s about getting to the place where you always wanted to be, and were convinced would make everything better, and realising it hasn’t worked, and the scary realisation that no amount of money or success or fame will.
I think the guy in the song has forsaken all his friendships and meaningful relationships to get to this place in his life or career, and now, realising it was never going to make him happy, is lamenting his loneliness and the wasted years, and trying to warn others away from the same way of thinking”.
Talking about the album he shared this:“I wanted to make an upbeat confident pop record about depression and being a performer, written from the viewpoint of an artist who has hollowed himself out over a long career in the name of success, an alternate universe version of me, who is left empty and lonely from climbing to the top, but is still only able to express these feelings in the language of confident, performative pop songs.”
No tour dates around the USofA (nor Tijuana) have been announced yet.
Human Potential has announced the release of their fifth album, “Hoosi, No!”, Out February 24th via What Delicate Recordings.
TRACKLIST:
1. Hoosi, No! 2. Book of Jaws 3. I Have To Leave Because There Are No Rivers Here 4. Zwunck 5. Some Small Anti-Christ At The Art Show 6. 80 All Over 7. Love Song For H.R. To Sing 8. Dye-Night Escapes 9. Queasy Bricks and Starving Cars: The Spectacular Collapse Of The Wing Street Bridge
The first single off the album is the track opener and self titled song, the video was directed by Andrew Becker himself.
In the summer of 2020 a Lithuanian stenographer named Steakman sent Becker an unearthed demo of the heretofore thought apocryphal Sherman Helmsley / Gong collaboration. The sounds were alarmingly profound, providing a deep sonic exfoliation that sloughed off the miasmic effervescence of seismic hygienic and creative dereliction. AB’s musically stagnant world was suddenly shepherded off of its axis. Inspired, Becker sold his belongings and set out from his Los Angeles rondavel, armed with only a hagfish bindle and his former babysitter’s Bolang Gu, in search a new and completely unique sonic paradigm. For several months, he rode the rails in search of the euphonic promontory that he was convinced awaited him somewhere amid America’s alternately soggy / burning landscape. But, it wasn’t long before Becker found himself unexpectedly restrained to a cot, after waking up at an Aghori urgent care clinic in Sussex County, Delaware. Attendants informed Becker that he had been gravely injured in a knife fight after attempting to burgle the only known copy of Robert Goulet’s notorious Bathory covers album from a fellow transient. The lacerations to his face and nasal passages made emergency surgery imperative, resulting in the removal of his Jacobson’s organ – a peripheral sensory organ of the accessory olfactory system. Having previously relied on this largely unknown physiological instrument to decode and interpolate rhythm, frequency and timbre (a rare form of synesthesia) Becker immediately saw his musical aspirations dashed. Dejected and insolvent, Becker borrowed a lime green tank top from a Milford mystic and rode a shetland pony back to Los Angeles. At home, he set up a store on the Silk Road to sell his one last possession of value – a platinum-plated lock of hair extracted from the stand-in orangutan from silver screen sparkler, Dunston Checks In. With the handsome proceeds, Becker purchased a collection of laser discs from the estate of Jan-Michael Vincent and devised a plan to invert his routine musical sources and methods. Relying strictly on his visual sense, he clicked off the volume and set about rewriting the scores to the bounty of cinematic gems found in Vincent’s trove. The title sequence to Sam Peckinpah’s epic The Wild Bunch became the backdrop for opener, “Hoosi, No!,” a slovenly marriage of stately beauty and insidious violence. The eerie excavations of Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab masterpiece, “Leviathan,” spurred the lurching, unnerving, “Zwunck,” while a collection of Central American Manakin mating ritual clips prodded on the sturdy, sumptuous ravings of “80 All Over.” Before long, Becker had drawn inspiration from the repetitive disorientation of Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (“Some Small Anti-Christ At The Art Show”) and Hollis Frampton’s ruin of memory on Nostalgia (“Love Song For H.R. To Sing”), to the sultry light abstractions of John Cage’s “One11” (“Dye-Night Escapes”). “Queasy Bricks and Starving Cars: The Spectacular Collapse of the Wing Street Bridge” is the score to a film yet to be made, though it would be disingenuous to say it was not at all inspired by footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse of 1940. Eventually, Becker compiled this titillating tinkering into a new album entitled, Hoosi, No!, a compendium of transgressive sounds evoked by the complex imagery sewn into the very tapestry of cinema history. By any objective standard, the record is a four dimensional musical monolith, eliciting the stark lasciviousness of late-night gas huffing, the blood curdling rush of Icelandic puffin throwing and the narcotizing dalliance of transcendental levitation. The sound, at once fetching and lurid, pummels the pinna and confounds the cochlea with phantasmagoric frequencies, putrid pop plops and seductive squelches – a disparate mélange with the quixotic goal of uniting musical apostates of all stripes. But, in reality, welcome to hell.
The video for “Resurrection” was directed by Atiba Jefferson. Nate Kinsella said this about the video: “‘Resurrection’ is a celebration song about reawakening a part of the self that has been hidden away in hibernation. We used mirrors and some camera angle trickery to superimpose our heads onto the bodies of a couple of professional dancers, whose movements illustrate a kind of unselfconscious joy and freedom—feelings that maybe we have a hard time accessing, or tapping into. I hope the video transmits the sense of fun and liberation that we envisioned (and experienced!) when making it.”
Mike Kinsella shared this about the song:“I’m not used to putting any gold-linings or much of any positive spin into my songs (there’s already enough of that garbage existing in the world),” he says, “but writing about conquering whatever shame and guilt I have for whatever wants and desires I have, felt cathartic/almost therapeutic for me. The process of writing it and expressing the value in actually believing it has helped me feel more confident and assured with who I am and what I want (dare I say, ‘need’…).”
The cousins, and former American Football and Joan Of Arc band members, will go on a short USofA tour, no additional dates have been announced yet.
Sleaford Mods have shared another track, “Force 10 From Navarone”, off their upcoming album “UK Grim” out March 10th via Rough Trade.
The video for the song was directed by Eddie Whelan.
Jason Williamson said this in a press release about the song and working with Florence Shaw: “The track is a conversation with myself coming to terms with happiness and whether it is in fact a darker space than my negativity and depression. Coupled with that it explores the myth of activism and inaction of the majority in the UK in the presence of a corrupt government. We’re big fans of Dry Cleaning and knew Flo would be perfect for the track. She’s the real deal and conjures the inspiration I get from the likes of Wu-Tang in the way she uses one word to convey a whole story.”
Jonathan Bree has announced the release of their 5th studio album, “Pre-Code Hollywood”, out April 14th via Lil’ Chief Records.
TRACKLIST: 1. “City Baby” 2. “Pre-Code Hollywood” 3. “When We Met” 4. “Miss You” 5. “We’ll All Be Forgotten” 6. “Epicurean” 7. “Politics” 8. “You Are The Man” 9. “Destiny” 10. “Steel And Glass”
The first single off the album is the self titled track with a video directed by Jonathan Bree.
Via a press release this is how the album was described: “A dark disco album full of sad bangers. The album title refers to The Hays Code, a set of industry guidelines that massively restricted Hollywood between 1934 and 1968 and censored freedom of expression in cinema”.
Jonathan Bree and the Family will support the album with a European tour. No dates for the USofA have been announced yet.
The Yeahs Yeah Yeahs have shared a new single, “Blacktop”, off their most recent album “Cool It Down”.
The video for the song was directed by David Black.
Karen O had this to say about the song: “‘Blacktop’ stuck out to me early on, the demo was very stripped down instrumentally and emotionally. It was a step towards what radical closeness feels like after a long separation. Each record has one of these diamonds in the rough that just feels like flying to me. “It felt right to keep the video as stripped down and dare I say beautiful in its naïveté. David Black put us in front of his 70s analogue video camera with the intention to pull stills for band shots. He had me sing to ‘Blacktop’ before I had even memorized the lyrics, I thought I knew the song by heart but it felt like an introduction, like meeting it for the first time. It wasn’t intended to end up as a video and as a return to the earliest visuals from the record it completes a circle, we’re so happy we have it, a simple layered performance for a deceptively simple song. We hope you enjoy.”
They’ve also announced a string of US shows starting in May, with support from The Faint and Perfume Genius.
Depeche Mode have shared the first single, “Ghosts Again “, off their new album”Memento Mori” out March 17th.
TRACKLIST: 01 “My Cosmos Is Mine” 02 “Wagging Tongue” 03 “Ghosts Again” 04 “Don’t Say You Love Me” 05 “My Favourite Stranger” 06 “Soul With Me” 07 “Caroline’s Monkey” 08 “Before We Drown” 09 “People Are Good” 10 “Always You” 11 “Never Let Me Go” 12 “Speak To Me”
The video was directed by longtime collaborator, photographer, artwork and cover designer Anton Corbijn.
Dave Gahan shared this about the song: “To me, ‘Ghosts Again’ just captures this perfect balance of melancholy and joy.”
Martin Gore added this: “It’s not often that we record a song that I just don’t get sick of listening to. I’m excited to be able to share it.”
Of course they, Martin and Dave, will go out and tour the shit out of this album. Some dates are already sold out. And more dates are to be announced soon.
i think i better follow you around 