U.S. shows April 24th-May 22nd, 2020. Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between isout May 1st worldwide from Sub Pop.
Man Man is announcing the first U.S. dates in support of Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between, his forthcoming new album and Sub Pop debut. The 18-date, late-spring tour now begins April 24th in Salt Lake City at Metro Music Hall and currently ends May 22nd in Los Angeles at The Roxy. The trek will include stops in Denver (CO), St. Louis (MO), Cincinnati (OH), Louisville (KY), Indianapolis (IN), Pittsburgh (PA), Asheville (NC), Durham (NC), Charlotte (NC), Baton Rouge (LA), Houston (TX), Austin (TX), Dallas (TX), Norman (OK), Albuquerque (NM), Phoenix (AZ), and San Diego (CA). Tickets for these shows are on sale now and links are here. There will be additional live dates soon.
Apr. 24 - Salt Lake City, UT - Metro Music Hall [NEW DATE] Apr. 26 - Denver, CO - Bluebird [NEW DATE] Apr. 28 - St Louis, MO - Old Rock House Apr. 29 - Cincinnati, OH - Urban Artifact Brewery May 01 - Louisville, KY - Zanzabar May 02 - Indianapolis, IN - HiFi May 03 - Pittsburgh, PA - Club Café May 05 - Asheville, NC - The Grey Eagle May 06 - Durham, NC - Motorco May 07 - Charlotte, NC - Amos Southend May 09 - Baton Rouge, LA - Mid City Ballroom [NEW VENUE] May 10 - Houston, TX - Continental Club May 12 - Austin, TX - The Mohawk May 13 - Dallas, TX - Club Dada May 15 - Norman, OK - Opolis May 16 - Albuquerque, NM - Sister Bar May 17 - Phoenix, AZ - Crescent Ballroom May 21 - San Diego, CA - The Casbah May 22 - Los Angeles, CA - Roxy
“Cloud Nein,” the first offering from Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between, is earning praise for its ebullient, melancholic pop. Consequence of Sound says the track “is the perfect Man Man comeback song. It’s got everything we’ve been missing in the band’s absence: simple horn slides, parade-like percussion, fantastical vocal harmonies, and an undeniably catchy chorus. It also marks the return of frontman Honus Honus’ life lessons veiled under theatrical delivery.” Brooklyn Vegan called the lyric video “joyous” and noted the track for its “70s style pop.” And Rolling Stone offered this, “despite the characteristic negativity of the song, the music belies its darker side, finding Kattner wailing on the chipper-sounding chorus.”
Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between is now available for preorder from Sub Pop. LP preorders through megamart.subpop.com will receive the limited Loser edition on white vinyl with a pinkish swirl (while supplies last). After street date a limited supply of the Loser edition LP will be available at select independent retailers in North America and at Man Man’s live shows. Meanwhile, in the U.K. and Europe, preorders through select independent retailers will receive the limited Loser edition on pink vinyl (also, while supplies last). There is also a new T-shirt design available through megamart.subpop.com.
The 20-city international tour, which will include stops in the U.K., The Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, the U.S., and Canada, begins April 16th in London and currently ends May 22nd in Chicago at Bottom Lounge. Festival highlights include an appearance at Ableton Loop 2020 in Berlin, DE April 24th-26th, Motel Mazique Festival in Rotterdam, NL on April 18th, and Donaufestival in Krems, DE on May 2nd. Additionally, support for the North American tour dates (May 7th-22nd) will come from Sub Pop labelmates Cartel Madras.
A special fan presale for the North American shows begin Wednesday, March 11th at 10 am (local), with tickets on sale to the general public Friday, March 13th at 10 am (local). The U.K./European shows are on sale now. For up to date information on tickets, please visit Clipping’s official website.
Apr. 16 - London, UK - Islington Assembly Hall Apr. 17 - Brighton, UK - The Arch Apr. 18 - Rotterdam, NL - Motel Mazique Festival Apr. 20 - Lille, FR - L’Aeronoef Apr. 21 - Paris, FR - Badaboum Apr. 22 - Brussels, BE - Beursshouwburg Apr. 24 - Berlin, DE - Ableton Loop 2020 Apr. 25 - Berlin, DE - Ableton Loop 2020 Apr. 26 - Berlin, DE - Ableton Loop 2020 Apr. 28 - Hamburg, DE - Hafenklang Apr. 29 - Wiesbaden, DE - Schlachtnof May 01 - Munich, DE - Rote Sonne May 02 - Krems, DE - Donaufestival May 07 - Los Angeles, CA - The Echoplex * May 08 - Berkeley, CA - Cornerstone * May 10 - Portland, OR - Star Theatre * May 11 - Seattle, WA - Neumos * May 15 - Montreal, QC - Bar Le Ritz * May 16 - Toronto, ON - Adelaide Hall * May 17 - Philadelphia, PA - Underground Arts * May 19 - Brooklyn, NY - Music Hall of Williamsburg * May 20 - Boston, MA - Brighton Music Hall * May 22 - Chicago, IL - Bottom Lounge *
* w/ Cartel Madras
Clipping’s There Existed an Addiction to Blood earned placement on “Best Albums of 2019” lists from the likes of The Wire, The Needledrop, Passion of the Weiss, PopMatters (albums + best hip-hop), Treble Zine, The Line of Best Fit, Loud & Quiet, Genius, RIFF Magazine, Sputnikmusic, and more. Pop Matters says of the record, “Apocalyptic, claustrophobic, with danger in the air (“Nothing Is Safe”); in other words, reminiscent of our current moment in US history. Horror movie themes float amidst the background, but this is hip-hop, riddled with allusions to classics of the past while living in a now setting of vampires, zombies, and ghosts. (#7, “The 20 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2019”). Meanwhile, Treble Zine offers this, “There Existed an Addiction to Blood turns to horror as its conduit for dealing out home truths. Daveed Diggs remains in the highest tier of contemporary MCs in America, taking obvious joy from spinning between frisky, tongue-in-cheek junk culture references and cold, compact sucker punches of truth (#18 / “50 Best Albums of the Year”).”
There Existed an Addiction to Blood, which features the singles “Nothing Is Safe,”“La Mala Ordina,”“All in Your Head,” and “Blood of the Fang,” was produced by Clipping, mixed by Steve Kaplan, and mastered by Dave Cooley at Elysium Masters in Los Angeles. The album also features appearances from Ed Balloon, Benny the Butcher, Elcamino, La Chat, The Rita, and Pedestrian Deposit, and a composition from Andrea Lockwood.
On Record Store Day (April 18th), Clipping will also release Double Live, a collaboration with composer Christopher Fleeger, available in a stunning industrial double-picture-disc package. This is not a standard live album. All the audio was recorded during Clipping’s 2017 tour, but the microphones weren’t pointed at the band. Instead they were in toilets, taped to ceiling pipes, tied to trees, worn by roadies—hidden all over venues. The results were then synchronized and edited over more than a year. Double Live is an impossible performance heard by hundreds of disembodied ears—part live album, part tour document, part musique concrète piece.
Shabazz Palaces new full-lengthThe Don of Diamond Dreams will be available April 17th, 2020 worldwide on Sub Pop. The 10-track album includes the highlights “Fast Learner (ft. Purple Tape Nate),” “Chocolate Souffle,” “Bad Bitch Walking (ft. Stas THEE Boss),” and “Thanking The Girls,” with additional contributions from singer/keyboardist Darrius Willrich, percussionist Carlos Niño, Knife Knights collaborator OCnotes, saxophonist Carlos Overall, and bassist Evan Flory-Barnes.
Stream the lead track “Fast Learner (ft. Purple Tape Nate)” here now.
Shabazz Palaces will tour extensively in 2020 in support of The Don of Diamond Dreams. Live dates will be announced soon.
The Don of Diamond Dreams was recorded throughout 2019 and produced by Shabazz Palaces at Protect and Exalt: A Black Space in Seattle, mixed and engineered by Erik Blood with mixing assistance from Andy Kravitz at Studio 4 Labs in Venice, California, and mastered by Scott Sedillo at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Los Angeles.
The Don of Diamond Dreams is now available for preorder from Sub Pop.
Preorders of the LP through megamart.subpop.com and select independent retailers in North America will receive the limited Loser edition on clear vinyl with a silver swirl (while supplies last). All LP preorders through the Sub Pop Mega Mart will also receive The Mushroom, a 90-page, 8x8 inch zine from the elusive author TTT, inspired by The Don of Diamond Dreams (the book will also be available for purchase at Shabazz Palaces live shows).
[Pictured above: The Mushroom zine]
Meanwhile, LP preorders through select independent retailers in the U.K. and Europe will receive the limited Loser edition on sky blue vinyl (also, while supplies last). There will also be a new T-shirt design available.
Shabazz Palaces The Don of Diamond Dreams Tracklisting: 1. Portal North: Panthera 2. Ad Ventures 3. Fast Learner (ft. Purple Tape Nate) 4. Wet 5. Chocolate Souffle 6. Portal South: Micah 7. Bad Bitch Walking (ft. Stas THEE Boss) 8. Money Yoga (ft. Darrius) 9. Thanking The Girls 10. Reg Walks By The Looking Glass (ft. Carlos Overall)
[Photo Credit: Patrick O’Brien-Smith]
About Shabazz Palaces The Don of Diamond Dreams: Cruise the city in a night ship, dressed to kill in the Seville. Float down waterfalls and fountains, reclined on some pimp shit. The time zone ghost returns to paint a picture that echoes through infinity. The sun is put to rest, the soliloquy is killer bee. A diamond purpose lying beneath the surface. Nothing is ever what it seems, but forever is the theme. It’s time. Shabazz Palaces are back with yet another classic of divine mathematics design. More dazzling Afrofuturist sutras to illuminate distant constellations with sacred abstractions. Enter The Don of Diamond Dreams, raw and uncut, but glowing with 10,000 karat shine.
If you adhere to the corporeal limitations of space and chronology, it’s been roughly a decade since Shabazz Palaces first shook the ramparts with their debut stylistic revolution, Black Up – which Pitchfork named as one of the Best of the 2010s, hailing it as an “album of impossible vision.” But the project masterminded by vocalist and producer Ishmael Butler has never conformed to gravitational consideration or terrestrial measurement. They are heirs to the astral imagination of Sun Ra and George Clinton, Octavia Butler and Alice Coltrane. If they technically claim residence in Seattle, their sound emanates much closer to Alpha Centauri than Alki Beach.
In his unstinting drive to reimagine hip-hop, Butler remains one of the preeminent visionaries of the last quarter-century. His first album with Digable Planets, Reachin (A New Refutation of Time and Space), nodded at Miles Davis in the first half of its title, but 27 years later, he has become one of the most vaunted inheritors of the trumpet deity’s rarefied legacy – still innovating as he enters his fourth decade as a working musician – splintering, rebuilding, and expanding the possibilities of sound. He has collaborated with like-minded visionaries Flying Lotus and Thundercat, Battles and Animal Collective. While all-timers like Radiohead and Lauryn Hill have invited him to join them on tour.
It remains impossible to accurately describe a Shabazz Palaces album without lapsing into cosmic tropes. Yet sometimes clichés are stand-ins for eternal truths. Therein, The Don of Diamond Dreams embodies a futuristic manifestation of ancient myth, full of robotic vocoder and warped auto-tune, Funkadelic refracted into different dimensions, weird portals and warm nocturnal joy rides alongside the coast (a reflection of it being mixed near the beach in California). The synthesizers are alien but the drums speak a universal language. It is hip-hop, dub, jazz, R&B, soul, funk, African, experimental, and occasionally even pop. But over the course of five albums, Shabazz Palaces have conceived the fluid boundaries of their own one-band genre.
Even though the construction of the album is meticulous, it’s a startling masterpiece of improvisation and instinct. It’s both cerebral and automatic, with Butler jotting down phrases and ideas in his phone and eventually shaping them into amorphous abstract expressionist canvasses. If anything, their latest illustrates Butler’s gift for being a conduit of sounds and experience. It’s partially shaped by his own reflection on being a parent and watching his son, Jazz, become internationally renowned as the artist, Lil Tracy. If you listen closely, you can hear the interplay between father and son, as Butler does what is impossible for most veteran artists: he absorbs the sounds of today’s youth, but filters it through his own fractured lens, spitting back convex poems with wild cadences, freestyling with the wisdom of age and the frenetic passion of someone still trying to show and prove. It’s confident and suffused with the thing that defines almost all great art: the willingness to risk attempting something new.
There is “Ad Ventures,” a shout out to Butler’s crew, The Black Constellation. The beat operates like a melodic free jazz hymn, with Ish boasting about Ethiopian carats and watching lakes from a theological terrace. It’s an imagistic rendering of their tours through Europe in sprinter vans, blitzing from place to place and absorbing every detail. Featuring Purple Tape Nate, “Fast Learner” offers odd splendor, spoken word reveries and flexes that wriggle through a wrinkle in time. The synthesizers sound like New Age from the 37th century crossed with 90s R&B, the drums are slow and seething. On top of that, Butler laid a guitar line down and auto-tune harmonies that instantiate the feeling of driving along PCH at night.
“Wet” is a freestyle of sorts with Ish offering his own twist on contemporary rap cadences but making it sound like an underwater Atlantis symphony. There are Based God shoutouts and fuzzy guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Ariel Pink album. “Chocolate Souffle” is some god-level shit-talking in the way that only Butler could do: replete with Maurice Chevalier allusions and admissions of being an “elitist at the zenith of slick demeanor.” While “Thanking the Girls” might be the most poignant song in the Shabazz catalog, a song that acknowledges the myriad positive ways in which women have shaped Butler’s life. The second verse is dedicated to his two daughters and the pride which they engender. Of course, this is a Shabazz Palaces song so the beat sounds like a riff on Panda Bear distilled through a bent futuristic boom-bap prism.
In some respects, it’s difficult to consider the possibility that this might be the best Shabazz Palaces album yet. Very few musicians have ever peaked in their fifth decade on earth, but whoever said they were actually from earth? It’s wrong to say that Shabazz Palaces have gone beyond the looking glass. This time they’ve shattered it entirely and created a brilliant new universe in each one of the shards.
For more than 30 years now, we at Sub Pop Records have strived to be a dependable source of excellent, exciting and important music and also, sometimes, when it all comes together, cultural change. It’s true what they say: we like to party. And our ability to participate in any of that is reliant upon a giant, interwoven community of artists and the people and organizations that support them. Right now, many of the people and communities in our world are being hit hard by the spread of, and wholly necessary response to, COVID-19.
You have seen this happening, we know. Artists are forced to cancel tours, venues can’t have shows, festivals are canceled or postponed. Musicians, record stores, production companies, tour crews, venue staff, booking agents, and so many other people working in our industry are losing jobs and opportunities, and there’s no telling what will happen next.
In an effort to keep our customers and staff safe and healthy, we decided to temporarily close the Sub Pop Airport Store at Sea-Tac, starting now. It will remain closed through at least the end of March. We’ll reassess after that. And please trust that we’ll be back at it as soon as we’re able. As of now, we are still shipping records, t-shirts and the like from our Seattle warehouse to mail order customers and record stores.
The world feels completely upside-down right now. More than ever, and right in the face of that, we remain dedicated to all of the artists on Sub Pop and Hardly Art whom we are so profoundly fortunate to work with. And, it seems absolutely vital to recognize that the music these artists create has the power to hold us upright and together, especially during unsteady, isolating times like these. This is important.
We may not be able to come together in a way that feels normal or familiar, but we are always connected to each other through music and art. Lean on that, hard! And do what you can to support the community of artists/musicians/beautiful losers/misfits/etc to which you belong. Please be safe, please help each other, and let’s all celebrate in person, together, when we get through this.
On Friday, March 20th, Sub Pop and Hardly Art will be passing through 100% of revenue from digital sales on Bandcamp to our current artists!
As you are all undoubtedly well aware, working/touring artists are one of the many groups of people currently being hit especially hard by the social distancing requirements of 2020 pandemic reality. In an effort to direct some support their way, Sub Pop and Hardly Art are joining with Bandcamp (and a ton of other labels) to send additional, needed revenue directly to artists.
Today, LA’s Moaning share the video for “Connect The Dots,” the latest single from their highly anticipated sophomore album, Uneasy Laughter. “Connect The Dots” was directed by Campbell Logan.
Of the track, Sean Solomon says: “The song is about realizing you need help and being brave enough to ask for it. It’s a misconception that asking for help is a sign of weakness. In reality it’s one of the hardest things you can do.” “Connect The Dots” was directed by Campbell Logan who notes “I created this video with the intention of inspiring self-forgiveness, something I think we should all practice. Making it gave me the opportunity to practice an approach that I like to call Filmmaking Simulation, which is a process of doing film production using virtual cinematography, set design and performance. The result is photorealistic and mimics live action. We had an extremely quick turnaround on the video, but were able to complete it in a little over a month, and despite these hurdles I’m so proud of it!”
To celebrate the release of Uneasy Laughter, Moaning will be streaming a virtual listening party via Youtube on Friday, March 20th at 11am PST / 2pm EST. WATCH HERE.
“The L.A. trio follow dutifully in the footsteps of Siouxsie and the Banshees and early Cure.” -Pitchfork
“Recalls early New Order… The rigid surface of the band’s post-punk jams can only barely contain Moaning’s raw, infectious intensity.” -NPR
“Moaning craft anxious music for an increasingly nervous local scene.” -LA Times
“Equal parts Joy Division and The Cure.” -UPROXX
“The band leans away from their rock roots and delivers a soaring piece of angsty, melodic synth-pop.” -MTV
“While still incorporating some punchy guitar work, the utilization of spine-chilling, David Lynch-type synths adds some much needed height.” -Stereogum
