Release: Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee drop their debut album Los Angeles due out November 3 via Play It Again Sam.
The 13 tracks on the album dive into freedom and slavery, beauty and decay, hope and despair, and feature a list of guest vocalists and musicians including The Edge (U2), Isaac Brock (Modest Mouse), Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream), Civil Rights avant-garde artist Lonnie Holley, Mary Lattimore, Mark Bowen (IDLES) and more.
The band has also shared the album’s title track and first single which features James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem), along with a video – listen and watch here:
Stream here.
As per the title, Los Angeles is a journey into the dark heart of contemporary LaLaLand, the city of its birth, a place of limitless possibility, yet also a diseased and consumptive hell-on-earth which, to quote Murphy’s lyric on the title track, “eats its children,” where pipe dreams shatter, racial inequality prevails and homelessness spirals. Throw in the terrifying uncertainty occasioned by the global pandemic, which both interrupted and ultimately aided its genesis, and the ‘new Cold War’ terror that has ensued, and you get a record fueled by fear and tension, but whose propulsive beats, mind warping, mangled instrumentation and exceptional vocal contributions provide release through the palpable joy of their creation. Far-sighted and visionary, it lands just in time for those Album of the Year polls.
In addition to the album, Lol Tolhurst will also release his second book, GOTH: A History, on September 26 in the U.S. via Hachette. The engaging historical memoir of Goth music and the culture explores creative giants like The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and many more great bands that offered a place of refuge for the misfits of the 1980s and ever since. GOTH offers a fascinating deep dive with stories and anecdotes from Tolhurst’s personal memories as well as the musicians, magicians, and artists who made goth an inevitable and enduring movement.
‘LOS ANGELES’ TRACK LISTING
1. This Is What It Is (To Be Free) [with Bobby Gillespie]
2. Los Angeles [with James Murphy]
3. Uh Oh [with Mark Bowen (IDLES)]
4. Ghosted At Home [with Bobby Gillespie]
5. Train With No Station [with The Edge]
6. Bodies [with Lonnie Holley and Mary Lattimore]
7. Everything And Nothing
8. Travel Channel [with Pam Amsterdam]
9. Country of the Blind [with Bobby Gillespie]
10. The Past (Being Eaten)
11. We Got To Move [with Isaac Brock]
12. Noche Oscura [with The Edge]
13. Skins [with James Murphy]