!!! ANNOUNCES NINTH STUDIO ALBUM
LET IT BE BLUE OUT MAY 6 VIA WARP RECORDSΒ
SHARE ELECTRIFYING SINGLE/VISUALIZER “STORM AROUND
THE WORLD (FT. MARIA UZOR)”
Warp Records mainstay !!! announce their forthcoming ninth studio album Let It Be Blue out May 6, 2022. Along with the announcement, the band shares their electrifying single “Storm Around The World (ft. Maria Uzor).” “Storm Around the World,” starts out unassuming. Drum machines, bluish synthesizers, Rafael Cohen’s pristine vocals. Then it turns into a hypertrophied, club freakout. Sink Ya Teeth’s Maria Uzor jumps on the track, oscillating between spoken word and mysterious, hypnotic vocal runs. The song feels like a night bus conversation between Uzor and Cohen. Listen/watch “Storm Around The World” here.
!!! on “Storm Around the World” – “Storm Around the World” is a song we’ve had since the last album that didn’t really come into focus until Maria Uzor from Sink Ya Teeth added her part and we turned it into a duet. Originally an acid workout about parents who leave on tour it became much more than that with her vocal, which is equal parts sing-song and spoken word and who’s lyrics helped add both a familiarity and a mystery to the song. On this record we were looking for basic minimal arrangements– sub-bass, drums and vocals mostly– and that approach is what finally let us support the vocal parts in a way that worked. The final piece was the beat that our producer Patrick Ford made that felt somewhere between programmed, sampled and played, a blurriness that is another feature of this album, Let it be Blue, which was mostly built on computers but doesn’t always sound or feel that way.
!!! will be on tour this year, including shows at Treefort Music Festival in Boise, ID, Just Like Heaven Festival In Pasadena, CA, and Music Hall Of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NY.
There’s this thing about making art where in order to make it feel exciting for yourself, you have to reinvent yourself each time. You have to keep pushing. Go at it like a beginner. Take a white wall and color it in. Every new thing you make has to feel like a statement, the best new version of yourself. Dance punk royals !!! know the feeling wellβthey’ve been releasing urgent, obliterative, fuck-you music for 25 years. Music, for !!!, has to be a place where anything can happen. To quote frontman Nic Offer “We’ve always been pushing towards something stranger and weirder. We had to keep pushing on.”
The band’s ninth record, Let it Be Blue, takes that feeling of constant, radical transformation to new, untapped zones. It’s a record of sparse dance music. The kind of stuff you want to put on loud, let loose, go to the bar to get a drink only to abandon your plans because the song that just came on was too good not to dance to.
Let it Be Blue is a computer record, but it doesn’t feel like it. Featuring production from Patrick Ford, Let it Be Blue is the product of file sharing, trading stems, song particles, little ideas on their way to being fully realized dance tracks. It was conceived during the past two years, with dreams of future dancefloors very much on the brain. The resulting 11 songs are some of the band’s most production focused offerings to date. They’re crystalline, full of sub-bass and drums. It evokes visions of clubs where a concoction of Dembow and acid house play at volumes so loud your ears hurt and you forget what day of the week it is. In other words, it’s a !!! album. It makes you freak out a little bit.
Making something sparse was an exciting challenge for the band. “Starting as a band with seven or eight people, we were always crowding everything in and trying to fit as many parts as possible,” says Offer. Let it Be Blue is a departure from that. It’s minimalist, but that doesn’t at all mean that these songs aren’t complicated, self-contained worlds. They are.
The record’s cast of collaborators are another !!! signature, another way for the band to feel constantly excited about the discovery process that is making new work. This shift has been in the works for a decade. It started on Thr!!!ler, a record that you might consider a turning point in the band’s expansive discography. In the past decade, the band has collaborated with an exciting rotation of artists. On this record, that desire to experiment alongside other artists feels especially realized. “Those characters stand out more,” says Offer. They feel especially distinct. When Angelica Garcia hops on vocals on “Un Puente,” the scenery changes again. We’re not in the New York City lofts of yore, we’re on a goddamn beach, pupils dilated, bouncing from high BPM.
Let it Be Blue is a record about discovery, uncovering new parts of yourself, going there. How many dance records start off with an acoustic track? Let it Be Blue does, it’s called “Normal People,” and it’s a Laurel Canyon-esque amuse bouche. It’s tongue in cheek, it’s like walking taking a first step in a new place before everything changes in weird and excellent ways. It’s kind of like a Pandora’s Box. Open it up, the whole world shifts and transforms around you. Mostly though, it will make you really want to get down and dance.
Tour Dates
Mar 26 – Boise, ID – Treefort Music Fest
Mar 30 – Madrid, ES – Teatro Eslava
Mar 31 – Valencia, ES – Moon Valencia
Apr 01 – Barcelona, ES – Sala Apolo
May 12 – Vancouver, BC – Fox Cabaret
May 13 – Seattle, WA – The Crocodile
May 14 – Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios
May 16 – Sacramento, CA – Harlow’s
May 17 – San Francisco, CA – The Chapel
May 19 – San Diego, CA – Casbah
May 21 – Pasadena, CA – Just Like Heaven Fest
Jun 08 – Washington, DC – Union Stage
Jun 09 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg
Jun 10 – Fairfield, CT – The Warehouse
Jun 11 – Philadelphia, PA – Underground Arts
Jun 12 – Pittsburgh, PA – Thunderbird Music Hall
Jun 14 – St. Louis, MO – Old Rock House
Jun 15 – Chicago, IL – Sleeping Village
Jun 17 – Ferndale, MI – The Loving Touch
Jun 18 – Columbus, OH – Rumba Cafe
ArtistΒ Links
Background Photo Credit: Tim Saccenti
SPILL NEW MUSIC: !!! (CHK CHK CHK) SHARE TWO COVERS – TRACY CHAPMAN’S “FAST CAR” + R.E.M.’S “MAN ON THE MOON” VIA WARP RECORDS
SPILL NEWS: (CHK CHK CHK) SHARE NEW VIDEO FROM “TOO MANY COOKS” DIRECTOR // ON US TOUR NOW
