Du Blonde has announced the release of her fourth LP ‘Sniff More Gritty’, alongside a new single ‘TV Star’ and an upcoming UK tour. Check out the dates and album tracklist below.
The artist’s fourth LP ‘Sniff More Gritty’ sees Du Blonde take the role of producer and engineer while enlisting an eclectic list of collaborators, with features from Skunk Anansie’s Skin, Against Me!‘s Laura Jane Grace, Maximo Park’s Paul Smith and The Futureheads’ Ross Millard.
The record is set for release November 1 via Daemon T.V. You can pre-order it here.
Alongside the announcement, Du Blonde has released a new single ‘TV Star’ — a grunge-pop exploration of the toxicity of succumbing to fame, and how people can change with mass attention. “Congratulations, you’re a TV star,” they begin in a monotone drawl over the strum of an acoustic guitar. “Hit the bigtime, bought a brand new car / Was it worth it, do you know who you are?”
“It’s the story of who somebody was before and after fame, and the sadness of losing the good person they used to be,” Du Blonde says of the raucous track.
The accompanying music video stars actor and musician Pete Chekvala, and cuts between new footage and 10-year-old clips of Du Blonde and Chekvala to “depict the purity and innocence of the early years,” the artist explains.
“Although I’m acting in the early clips, I can see even now how much softer I was and how much I still believed in the magic of people,” they say of the video that was a decade in the making. “I feel like a lot of the new album swings between characters and mindsets and being able to play with the more unhinged sides of my personality both lyrically and aesthetically has been really freeing and fun.”
‘Sniff More Gritty’ will see Du Blonde take aim at past loves and record industry execs through a soundscape of glam-rock, punk and pop.
Check out the tracklist and album cover below.
The ‘Sniff More Gritty’ tracklist is:
1 – ‘Perfect’
2 – ‘Dollar Coffee’
3 – ‘Solitary Individual’ (feat. Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace)
4 – ‘TV Star’
5 – ‘Out of a Million’
6 – ‘ICU’
7 – ‘Blame’
8 – ‘Lucky’
9 – ‘Yesterday’
10 – ‘Next Big Thing’ (feat. Skunk Anansie’s Skin)
11 – ‘Radio Jesus’ (feat. Maximo Park’s Paul Smith & The Futureheads’ Ross Millard)
12 – ‘Metal Detector’
Alongside the album announcement, they also shared details of a UK tour commencing early next year. Du Blonde will kick off the shows on January 22 in Edinburgh, before heading to Glasgow (23), Newcastle (24), Manchester (26) and Leeds (28). They’ll then perform in Bristol, Birmingham and Brighton in early February, before wrapping up the live dates in London on February 6.
Tickets go on sale tomorrow (August 23) at 10am BST. You can find all tour dates below and buy your tickets here.
Du Blonde’s tour dates are:
JANUARY 2025
22 – Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh
23 – Broadcast, Glasgow
24 – The Cluny, Newcastle
26 – YES (Basement), Manchester
28 – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
29 – Yellow Arch, Sheffield
31 – Bodega, Nottingham
FEBRUARY
1 – The Flapper, Birmingham
2 – Thekla, Bristol
4 – DUST, Brighton
6 – Moth Club, London
The most recent full-length record from Du Blonde was 2021’s ‘Homecoming’. In a four-star review, NME said: “It’s a record laced with a sardonic sense of humour…and one whose author seems to revel in the joyful anarchy of not quite fitting in. “Didn’t think I’d be 30, broke and happy,” they grin on the freewheeling ‘Ducky Daffy’, summing up this explosively optimistic album in one balloon drop of a line.”
Shortly after the album’s release, they opened up about their diagnosis with Tourette Syndrome.
“Only my friends and family have known about this part of my life because after a lot of research the most overwhelming and scary thing for me was the potential for people to say it’s fake,” they wrote.
“But I realise waiting for a diagnosis feeds into this idea that anyone has to ‘prove’ they have a disability. So I almost wish I’d said something sooner. If my job didn’t involve interviews and interactions with strangers en mass I wouldn’t feel the need to talk about it on social media, but doing so means I can take control over my future. If I tried to hide it I wouldn’t be able to tour.”
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