Phoenix have announced details of their new album ‘Alpha Zulu’ and shared a new track, ‘Tonight’, which features Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig.
The French band made recently made their return with the album’s title track, which marked their first piece of new music since 2021 single ‘Identical’.
‘Alpha Zulu’ arrives on November 4 via Loyaute/Glassnote Records and was produced by the band. The album was recorded in Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which sits in the Palais du Louvre.
‘Tonight’ provides a new first for Phoenix, with Koenig’s appearance on the track marking the first time that a guest vocalist has featured on one of the band’s songs. “Could you come tonight? / I’ve got a feeling that you know the number,” Koenig sings, before swapping lines with Thomas Mars.
The video was filmed in Tokyo and Paris, capturing Koenig and the band on opposite sides of the world in a split screen. Watch the Oscar Boyson-directed clip above.
The tracklist for ‘Alpha Zulu’ is as follows:
01. ‘Alpha Zulu’
02. ‘Tonight feat. Ezra Koenig’
03. ‘The Only One’
04. ‘After Midnight’
05. ‘Winter Solstice’
06. ‘Season 2’
07. ‘Artefact’
08. ‘All Eyes On Me’
09. ‘My Elixir’
10. ‘Identical’
“We felt it would be a fantastic adventure to create something out of nothing in a museum,” guitarist and keyboardist Laurent “Branco” Brancowitz said in a press release of the band’s unusual recording facilities. “And so with the pandemic, we could live exactly this scene, to be alone in an empty museum.”
“I was a bit afraid, when there was too much beauty around us, that to create something could be a bit hard,” added guitarist Christian Mazzalai. “But it was the opposite: we couldn’t stop producing music. In these first 10 days, we wrote almost all of the album.”
Phoenix kicked off their latest North American tour in St. Paul, Minnesota last night (September 6), with the dates continuing until mid-October. In November, the band will return to the UK for one gig at London’s O2 Academy Brixton before heading to Europe for a run of shows on the continent.
The French group teased more new music last month when they shared a video of bassist Deck D’Arcy playing a riff in a recording room alongside the caption: “Done in the studio – new music coming.”
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