The Decemberists share new single "Oh No!" from upcoming album "As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again" out 14th June via YABB Records (Thirty Tigers)
With their new album As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again due out 14th June via YABB Records (Thirty Tigers), The Decemberists have released a new single “Oh No!” from this highly-anticipated release. The band’s ninth studio album after a 6 year hiatus is a remarkable double LP produced by lead-singer Colin Meloy and Tucker Martine and featuring guest appearances from The Shins’ James Mercer and REM’s Mike Mills. The band have shared a live performance video of “Oh No!” recorded at the Hallowed Halls in Portland, Oregon – listen and watch HERE.
Colin Meloy on “Oh No!”: “Oh No!” is the sort of song that just tumbles out of you. It all started with the first line — “It was on a wedding night / How they danced by the firelight” — and flowed from there. In my mind, the narrator of the song is channelling the two brothers from Emir Kusturica’s immortal film, ‘Underground.’ This song is about causing havoc, causing chaos, its narrator forever followed by an even greater form of chaos, a great darkness. But it’s a darkness you can dance to!”
As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is not only the longest Decemberists album to date (and their first intentional, proper double-LP, split into four thematic sides) but also their most empathetic and accessible, its 13 songs like semaphores of mutual recognition for our fraught times and faint hopes. The existential slog and capitalist vexation of “The Reapers,” the opiated delusion and jumbled jingoism of “America Made Me,” the guileless tenderness and absolute surrender of “All I Want Is You”: As It Ever Was is the redemptive testament of a band finding new communal hymns by revisiting several old modes at once. This, Meloy will tell you proudly, is the best Decemberists album—perhaps even the ultimate realization of 22 years of work.
The band teased the new album with the release of the single “Burial Ground”. “The Decemberists are so back,” declared Flood Magazine. “Burial Ground revives the band’s warm, familiar folk-rock sound,” said Paste Magazine. They followed up the track with a 19-minute prog-rock epic “Joan In The Garden” and a potent love song, “All I Want Is You”.
The Decemberists are currently out on an expansive North American tour with both spring and summer legs. The band will also be appearing at All Points East in London on 25th August.