The New Pornographers have announced their next album, Continue As a Guest, which will be out on March 31 via their new label home Merge Records. First single ‘Really Really Light’ was co-written with Dan Bejar, who does not appear elsewhere on the album. Check out its Christian Cerezo-directed video and find the album artwork and tracklist below.
To make ‘Really Really Light’, the band’s Carl Newman repurposed a Dan Bejar song originally written for 2014’s Brill Bruisers. “Part of my process throughout the years has been messing with things I never finished,” Newman explained in a statement. “I really liked Dan’s chorus, and for a while I was just trying to write something that I felt like belonged with it. I was thinking of the Aloe Blacc song ‘The Man’ which interpolated the chorus from Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ and thought it would be fun to interpolate a song that no one knows. Not trying to sound like Aloe Blacc, just doing some interpolating of my own. It became a game of writing a verse that felt like a part of the same song. In my mind, I was striving for a little Jeff Lynne–era Tom Petty, a classic go-to.”
One of the songs on Continue As a Guest, ‘Firework in the Falling Snow’, was co-written with Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz. The 10-track LP also features contributions from saxophonist Zach Djanikian. The New Pornographers’ last full-length was 2019’s In the Morse Code of Brake Lights.
Continue As a Guest Cover Artwork:
Continue As a Guest Tracklist:
1. Really Really Light
2. Pontius Pilate’s Home Movies
3. Cat and Mouse with the Light
4. Last and Beautiful
5. Continue as a Guest
6. Bottle Episodes
7. Marie and the Undersea
8. Angelcover
9. Firework in the Falling Snow
10. Wish Automatic Suite