Posted by Gruff Rhys will release new album ‘Seeking New Gods’ on May 21st.
The Welsh artist completed the record following a pre-pandemic North American tour, mixing the record alongside super-producer Mario C.
Out on May 21st, another chapter in his storied and always fascinating career, and it began as a sort of biography of a mountain.
Fixating upon Mount Paektu – an East Asian active volcano – those themes of impermanence and the grandeur of time began to open up other pathways.
Gruff Rhys comments… “The album is about people and the civilizations, and the spaces people inhabit over periods of time. How people come and go but the geology sticks around and changes more slowly. I think it’s about memory and time. It’s still a biography of a mountain, but now it’s a Mount Paektu of the mind. You won’t learn much about the real mountain from listening to this record but you will feel something, hopefully.”
New song ‘Loan Your Loneliness’ is online now, a pun-tastic return that searches fro a quiet sense of optimism in this increasingly fragmented world.
The video is online now, with Gruff commenting: “The monochrome has made it look much sharper and stylish (for want of a better word – I don’t think I know what style is!) like a Japanese 60’s pop show or something!”
“We added a layer of cloud to add some spot colour and to integrate the album sleeve aesthetic to the video. The colour was always stronger at the very end – I don’t particularly like the brown slippery dinosaurs but love the mammoths and northern lights…. so we bought it back to colour by the end – the narrative being that a soloing guitarist accidentally invented colour TV with sheer exuberance!”
Tune in now.
‘Seeking New Gods’ will be released on May 21st.
Photo Credit: Mark James
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