The New Pornographers have revealed the upcoming release of their new album ‘Continue as a Guest’.
Set to arrive on March 31st via Merge Records, the album was inspired by the “ambivalence of day-to-day life during the pandemic and the endless pitfalls of living online” according to A.C. Newman, the band’s frontman.
“The idea of continuing as a guest felt very apropos to the times,” he continues. “Feeling out of place in culture, in society – not feeling like a part of any zeitgeist, but happy to be separate and living your simple life, your long fade-out. Find your own little nowhere, find some space to fall apart, continue as a guest.”
Alongside the announcement, the band has shared a single from the album titled ‘Really Really Light’. Co-written by Dan Bejar, Newman explains: “Part of my process throughout the years has been messing with things I never finished. I really liked Dan’s chorus, and for a while I was just trying to write something that I felt like belonged with it.
“I was thinking of the Aloe Blacc song ‘The Man’ which interpolated the chorus from Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ and thought it would be fun to interpolate a song that no one knows. Not trying to sound like Aloe Blacc, just doing some interpolating of my own. It became a game of writing a verse that felt like a part of the same song. In my mind, I was striving for a little Jeff Lynne–era Tom Petty, a classic go-to.”
The track listing for ‘Continue as a Guest’ reads:
1. Really Really Light
2. Pontius Pilate’s Home Movies
3. Cat and Mouse with the Light
4. Last and Beautiful
5. Continue as a Guest
6. Bottle Episodes
7. Marie and the Undersea
8. Angelcover
9. Firework in the Falling Snow
10. Wish Automatic Suite
