Indie rockers The New Pornographers are set to release their Merge Records debut ‘Continue as a Guest’
Continue as a Guest, the new album from The New Pornographers, is set for release on March 31 via Merge Records – home to M. Ward, Lambchop, The Magnetic Fields and Spoon.
The first single, Really Really Light, drops today, co-written with Destroyers Dan Bejar, was picked up and refashioned from a cutting-room-floor track from the band’s acclaimed 2014 album Brill Bruisers.
A.C. Newman shares “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.”
Over the course of writing and recording Continue as a Guest, Newman discovered new lyrical, artistic and sonic approaches experimenting with his own vocal register.
The 10-track record is produced by Newman and features friends Neko Case, Kathryn Calder, John Collins, Todd Fancey and Joe Seiders as well as contributions from saxophonist Zach Djanikian and in addition to the Bejar co-write, glimmering track “Firework in the Falling Snow” was co-penned by Sadie Dupuis (Speedy Ortiz, Sad13).
The album tackles themes of aloneness and existentially break downs day-to-day life during the pandemic. Newman says that Continue as a Guest’s title track addresses the continually rolling concerns that come with being in a band for so long. “The idea of continuing as a guest felt very apropos to the times. 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.”
Check out the accompanying video of Really Really Light directed by Christian Cerezo.
Pre-order on CD, LP, or “color in color” opaque green in translucent blue Peak Vinyl in the Merge store, as well as exclusive colors from Vinyl Me Please, Barnes & Noble, and The New Pornographers store here.
