Gruff Rhys is releasing his new album Seeking New Gods through Rough Trade Records / Remote Control Records on Friday 21 May. This will be Gruff’s seventh solo album. Seeking New Gods was recorded following a US tour with his band and mixed in LA with superstar producer Mario C (Beastie Boys).
The album concept was originally driven to be the biography of a mountain, Mount Paektu (an East Asian active volcano). However, as Gruff’s writing began to reflect on the inhuman timescale of a peak’s existence and the intimate features that bring it to mythological life, both the songs and the mountain became more and more personal.
Gruff on the album “The album is about people and the civilizations, 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,” he suggests of Seeking New Gods’ meaning. “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.” – Gruff Rhys
Gruff on the video “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! “
Preorder Seeking New Gods.