Yo La Tengo release final album preview, ‘Sinatra Drive Breakdown’
Yo La Tengo have served up a final preview single ahead of their imminent album, This Stupid World, arriving this Friday, February 10th. ‘Sinatra Drive Breakdown’ follows ‘Fallout’ and ‘Aselestine, which pushed the bar excitingly high and set a precedent of eclecticism for the nine-track record.
Easing our thumbs from twiddle-wear in the run-up to Friday’s album launch, ‘Sinatra Drive Breakdown’ adds yet another dimension to what looks to be a sprawling and inspired LP. ‘Fallout’ arrived in November with an air of 1990s shoegaze before the docile, acoustic-clad musings of Georgia Hubley arrived in the gentle ‘Aselestine’ in January.
For their third preview, Yo La Tengo have released the album’s seven-and-a-half-minute opener. The track welcomes an intriguing mixture of percussive, overdriven textures to create an industrial sound of disorder that meets the eerie whispered vocals in a perfect storm.
Among the spontaneous bursts of guitar, Ira Kaplan intones, “I see clearly how it ends / I see the moon rise as the sun descends”, amongst references to the titular Hoboken, New Jersey waterfront boulevard.
This Stupid World is set for its full release this Friday and will be accompanied by a supporting international tour, including a date at The London Palladium on April 14th, alongside further UK dates.
Following on from 2020’s five-track ambient effort, We Have Amnesia Sometimes, This Stupid World will mark the band’s 17th studio album. According to press materials, the New Jersey indie legends recorded, produced and mixed the album at their own freedom, and within each song, there is a live band performance at the core before overdubs.
The absorbing and broadly improvisational tracks on This Stupid World have been described as “journeys, such as the three-dimensional swirl of ‘Brain Capers’, which blends guitar chords, bass loops, drum punches, and various iterations of [Georgia] Hubley and Kaplan’s voices (with lyrical references to Alice Cooper, Ray Davies, and Rick Moranis) into shifting layers, or the epic twilight wash of ‘Miles Away’ where a dubby rhythm lurks below Hubley’s bright paint-brush vocals. These touches, accents, and surprises make for a rarity: a raw-sounding record that gives plenty of headphone detail to get lost in.”
The album’s title and its corresponding track have a defiant declaration, suggesting a will to fight against the odds: “This stupid world – it’s killing me/ This stupid world – is all we have.”
Listen to Yo La Tengo’s brand new album opener, ‘Sinatra Drive Breakdown’, below.
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