Would you describe yourself as… “intellectual and sexually-frustrated”?
Ha. I’m just kidding. If you’re on this website, you don’t really need to answer that… Um, good news, though! Kevin Barnes’s electro-funk indie-pop outfit of Montreal is coming back in a decidedly colorful interstellar burst to save your universe.
He’s just announced a new album (his 14th!) for Polyvinyl, set for release on August 12. It’s called Innocence Reaches, and it properly follows 2015’s Aureate Gloom (and Record Store Day live-release Snare Lustrous Doomings). The album — which his press release called “his most light-hearted in years” — also finds Barnes, for the first time in his career, willfully “tuned into [the music of] now.”
“Forever I’ve been detached from current music,” he says. “I got into this bubble of only being in some other time period. I came up picking apart the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and symphonic pieces. But last year, I was hearing Jack Ü, Chairlift, Arca, and others, thinking about low end and sound collage. It was an extra layer to geek out on.”
He also just shared the album’s first taste on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 radio show. The track is an “exploration of the ‘dilemme féminin’,” which is meant to combine “Daft Punk’s aptitude for groove with LCD Soundsystem’s wit” entitled “its different for girls.” Check it out down below, and peep the artwork (created by Barnes’ brother David in an attempt to express his “wonderment for the female anatomy”) and tracklisting down below too. You can also pre-order the whole album now from Polyvinyl. (If you’re as “intellectual and sexually frustrated” as you claim to be, I’m thinking you’re probably also rich enough to afford the limited-edition, 180-gram, pink and green double-vinyl version?)
Innocence Reaches tracklisting:
o1. let’s relate
o2. it’s different for girls
o3 gratuitous abysses
o4. my fair lady
o5. les chants de maldoror
o6. a sport and a pastime
07. ambassador bridge
08. def pacts
09. chaos arpeggiating
10. nursing slopes
11. trashed exes
12. chap pilot
More about: of Montreal
