When Ruban Nielson puts out a new Unknown Mortal Orchestra album you can be sure it’s gonna be special. Each time out since his 2011 self-titled debut to 2015s Multi-Love, Nielson has tweaked and honed his mildly lo-fi and mildly psychedelic sound with cleaner production and more emphasis on songwriting. He’s not one to putz around the studio and half-ass it. He’s in it, all the way.
Nielson has returned with Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s newest record titled Sex & Food. The album will be released on April 6th via Jagjaguwar Records. About the album:
The follow-up to their critically acclaimed record Multi-Love, Sex & Food sees UMO mastermind Ruban Nielson tap into both familiar and unexpected territory. The delightfully shape-shifting album filters real-deal serious themes such as “What are we consuming? How is it affecting us, and why does everything feel so bad and weird sometimes?” through a vibrant sonic lens that spans battered drum-machine funk, doomy and thrashing rock and pink-hued psychedelic disco. It’s not a dark record, per se. Even the album’s title, Sex & Food, focuses on two of the most undeniably pleasurable experiences in life; positivity despite the strangeness of our times.
Along with the album news, the band have released a video for the first single, the fiery “American Guilt”. About the track, Nielson had this to say:
American Guilt is an attempt to capture some of the feelings floating around these days. In a perverse way I wanted to embrace this abandoned genre of rock music that I keep reading is “dead” and invite people to hear what this living dead genre sounds like in the UMO universe. It was recorded in Hanoi, Vietnam during monsoon season in a studio built for traditional Vietnamese music. Additional recording was done in Mexico City but our sessions were interrupted by one of the devastating earthquakes that occurred there last year. As we slept in the Parque de Mexico, unable to get back to our Air BnB, we heard a man yell “Viva la Mexico!” and I put this in the song out of respect for them.
Check out the video below. You can grab Sex & Food on April 6th from Jagjaguwar Records. Preorder the album right here.
UMO will be touring the album globally with 4 UK headline shows scheduled for May 2018, including a date at The Roundhouse in London on May 24th 2018.Tickets are available here. Full dates are below with UK shows in bold.
