DJ Shadow announces the brand new album, Action Adventure

His forthcoming eighth studio, Action Adventure, finds DJ Shadow continuing to evolve as a producer and songwriter.

The first sampled words heard on Action Adventure are “all my records and tapes.” They are some of the only words heard on what is almost an entirely instrumental release; they’re a kind of thesis statement for an inward-looking project, made by Shadow alone without any collaborators. Action Adventure tells the listener: “This is about my relationship to music. My life as a collector and curator. All my records and tapes, and no one else’s.”

Working on Action Adventure pushed Shadow deeper into composition. “I didn't want to write music that was formatted for vocalists. I wanted to write music that flexed different energies,” he says. Though he isn’t classically trained, he asked himself questions like “which chord progression would be most natural here, and which would be least predictable?” and worked according to the inner logic that felt right to him. His rule for the record was simple: no compromises.

The new album was largely taken influence from crate digging – from an eBay auction of 200 tapes that were recorded off the radio from a mix station that serviced the Baltimore/D.C. area in the ‘80s, through to auditioning records he’d not listened to from his 60,000 strong vinyl collection.

DJ shadow has been releasing music for over three decades now from his critically acclaimed landmark album “Endtroducing…..” through to his gold selling single “Nobody Speak” (feat. Run The Jewels), to his 2019 album Our Pathetic Age - a double LP featuring De La Soul, Nas, Run the Jewels, Pusha T, Inspectah Deck and Ghostface among others.