Gruff Rhys announces new album with lead cut "Loan Your Loneliness"

"Loan Your Loneliness" is the first taster of Rhys' forthcoming album, marking his first outing since collaborating with Whyte Horses on a cover of Brân’s "Tocyn" in 2019.

The new song is teamed with a Mark James-directed video. Rhys says, "The monochrome has made it look much sharper and stylish (for want of a better word - I don’t think I know what style is!!) like a Japanese 60’s pop show or something! We added a layer of cloud to add some spot colour and to integrate the album sleeve aesthetic to the video. The colour was always stronger at the very end - I don’t particularly like the brown slippery dinosaurs but love the mammoths and northern lights.... so we bought it back to colour by the end - the narrative being that a soloing guitarist accidentally invented colour TV with sheer exuberance!"

Seeking New Gods will follow Rhys' 2019 album Pang!, and was recorded after a US tour with his band before being mixed in LA with producer Mario C (Beastie Boys).

Rhys set out to make his new album as a biography of Mount Paektu (an active volcano in East Asia), but the songs turned out more personal. He explains, "The album is about people and the civilisations, and the spaces people inhabit over periods of time. How people come and go but the geology sticks around and changes more slowly. I think it’s about memory and time. It’s still a biography of a mountain, but now it’s a Mount Paektu of the mind. You won’t learn much about the real mountain from listening to this record but you will feel something, hopefully."

Tracklist:

1. Mausoleum Of My Former Self
2. Can't Carry On
3. Loan Your Loneliness
4. Seeking New Gods
5. Hiking in Lightning
6. Holiest of The Holy Men
7. The Keep
8. Everlasting Joy
9. Distant Snowy Peaks