Deerhunter has announced a new album, Fading Frontier. The album will follow on from 2013’s death-rattle absolution Monomania, and is set for release on October 16 via 4AD. The album was written by founding members Bradford Cox, Lockett Pundt and Moses Archuleta, and bassist Josh McKay in their hometown of Atlanta, GA. Continuing a collaboration that began with 2010’s Halcyon Digest, Ben H. Allen III shared production duties with the band.
Deerhunter has shifted from the noisy, hard-hitting rawness of their garage rock album Monomania, for something that they have called “strikingly balanced, and focused on melody and texture”. Rather than the sonic equivalent of a rusted skip-bin flying wantonly down a pot-holed road, we have brighter and more colourful production. This is perhaps captured in the album artwork, a photograph by Mark Divola called Zuma. Think kaleidoscopic art-rock.
Snakeskin, the first song from Fading Frontier, is a welcome taste of a funkier, less opaque-with-darkness sound. In fact, Snakeskin is a groovy piece of jangle pop-rock that keeps you bopping and bouncing. Except the Mojave desert rattlesnake beat and the ending sound collage still keep the song in Deerhunter’s normal palette. The video is an awesome piece of work directed by Valentina Tapia, which has Cox, donning over-sized overalls, as he gives us fairy-fingers and other queer gesticulations in a book-filled study. The video finishes with this extended close-up on Cox as light projections flicker playfully across his face. Give it a watch.