Land of Talk today announce their new album, Performances

“This was one of the earliest songs I wrote for the record and it came out of the session I did at my friend’s house I rented in Sutton, Quebec. There’s a little bit of Echo and the Bunnymen’s "Under the Killing Moon" in here," Powell says of the lead single. "We kept reworking the song in different studios and different contexts but it really clicked when I swapped out guitar for piano. Taking things out and allowing myself to be spare made it work. I wanted to be anti-virtuosic here. Also, my voice goes up the octave on this song in a really fun way. It was a weird and fun personal challenge to get my voice to start out that low.”

“This is me reclaiming Land of Talk as it always has been,” says Powell. “Every record we've made has just been one step closer to me figuring out how I want to make a record myself. I might not ever make an album like this again, but I just felt like I owed it to myself to try.

“It's the weirdest, mightiest little record I've made since I used to write music on my four-track when I was 14,” Powell explains. “I needed to make a love letter to my teenage self by being more vulnerable and doing all the production myself.”

“I realised right away that I was not feeling electric guitar for this album,” Powell says of Performances. “At first, I felt like something was wrong with me: Land of Talk is about guitars and me rocking out. But is that all I am? Can I get away with doing a Land of Talk record without a ton of electric guitar?” Instead of pandering to preconceived notions about their career so far, Powell decided to follow the muse and immerse themselves into this new artistic lane: “I would write demos and think, ‘Oh, that doesn't really kind of sound like Land of Talk,’” they say. “But then I realised that I'm Land of Talk.”

Work on Performances started in 2021 during a time that Powell refers to as a period of “identity confusion,” where they had trouble finding a place for the intimate, piano-based recordings they were making. While Performances is undoubtedly an ambitious leap and marked shift in focus for Land of Talk, to Powell, it’s a return to their roots. “My ears are always drawn to things that aren’t perfectly polished,” says Powell. “I came up as like a strapping lo-fi experimental recording artist. How can I get that feeling back and why not now?”

Performances follows 2020's Indistinct Conversations. Powell cites everything from rapper Nappy Nina, producers Sounwave and Pi’erre Bourne, as well as The Banshees of Inisherin as indirect inspirations of the album.

Tracklist:

1. Intro (high bright high)
2. Your Beautiful Self
3. Fluorescent Blood
4. Marry It
5. Rainbow Protection
6. Clarinet dance jam
7. Sitcom
8. Semi-Precious
9. August 13
10. Pwintiques