Beirut announces return with new album ‘Hadsel’

Beirut has announced his first new album in four years, ‘Hadsel’.

• READ MORE: Beirut – ‘Gallipoli’ album review

Zach Condon’s follow-up to 2019’s ‘Gallipoli’ is set to arrive on November 10 via his own Pompeii Records and is preceded by the new single ‘So Many Plans’.

Per a press release, the story of ‘Hadsel’ began when Condon set out to escape to a small cabin to recover from the persistent throat issues that forced him to cancel the end of his ‘Gallipoli’ tour in 2019. In early 2020, he travelled to the island of Hadsel in the northern part of Norway, where he met a a collector and fellow organ enthusiast named Oddvar, who gave him access to the local Hadselkirke, a wooden, octagonal structure housing a church organ that dated back to the early 1800s. It was the first church organ Condon would play, leading him to start working on a new record.

“During my time in Hadsel, I worked hard on the music, lost in a trance and stumbling blindly through my own mental collapse that I had been pushing aside since I was a teenager,” Condon said. “I was left agonising many things past and present while the beauty of the nature, the northern lights and fearsome storms played an awesome show around me. The few hours of light would expose the unfathomable beauty of the mountains and the fjords, and the hours-long twilights would fill me with subdued excitement. I’d like to believe that scenery is somehow present in the music.”

Meanwhile, on the subject of ‘So Many Plans’, he said: “I liked that this song struck a balance between the feelings of acceptance, hope and giving up. The lyric came from a covid-times lament that rolled effortlessly into a kind of short lullaby. The instruments were somewhat unusual for me at the time, having dusted off a baritone uke I never used before to join the album’s primary instruments of either pump or church organ and the modular synthesizer as percussion and bass.”

Check out the song below:

The tracklist of ‘Hadsel’ is as follows:

1. ‘Hadsel’
2. ‘Arctic Forest’
3. ‘Baion’
4. ‘So Many Plans’
5. ‘Melbu’
6. ‘Stokmarknes’
7. ‘Island Life’
8. ‘Spillhaugen’
9. ‘January 18th’
10. ‘Süddeutsches Ton-Bild-Studio’
11. ‘The Tern’
12. ‘Regulatory’

Beirut released a compilation album, ‘Artifacts’, last year, featuring unreleased Beirut tracks, early works, EPs and B-sides.

The post Beirut announces return with new album ‘Hadsel’ appeared first on NME.