SPIRITUALIZED
NEW VIDEO SINGLE AND VIDEO
“The Mainline Song”
OUT NOW
With their new LP Everything Was Beautiful due out April 22 via Fat Possum, today Spiritualized share a video for the third single to be taken from their already critically-acclaimed forthcoming album. The propulsive rush of “The Mainline Song” was at least partly inspired by the protests in the US happening towards the end of the first Lockdown in 2020. The equally dynamic video, directed by J Spaceman, can be viewed HERE.
Early acclaim for Everything Was Beautiful:
“A record that manages to be both direct and concise yet also wildly experimental, tender, nihilistic and joyous… It’s everything that you could want in a Spiritualized album.” Uncut – 9/10
“Much of Everything Was Beautiful has a vital, thundering pulse… Some fantastic songs aboard, too, including ‘Always Together With You’s Daniel Johnston-style naked expression of fatherly/romantic commitment, and a country-soul ballad, ‘Crazy’, complete with pedal steel. So, yes, utterly beautiful, as advertised.” MOJO – 4 stars ****
“An album chock-full of the soaring musical extravaganzas that make a Spiritualized record such an event.” Shindig – 5 stars *****
“A record that fills the void with ecstatic noise… Between Mainlines propulsive euphoria and the crashing grandeur of The A Song (Laid In Your Arms), a declaration of belief in the restorative powers of consuming sound takes potent, peak-Spaceman form.” Record Collector – 4 stars ****
“An immaculate orb of grandiose space-rock. Pierce’s rare communications are generally breathtaking events, and Everything Was Beautiful is no different.” Classic Rock – 9/10
“A life-affirming masterpiece, as euphoric as music can be.” Classic Pop – 9/10
“Some of the most adventurous and mind-bending music that Spiritualized have ever released… This is one of the most potent expressions of Pierce’s vision to date.” PROG
Spiritualized have previously shared videos for ‘Always Together With You’ and ‘Crazy’ from the album.
(Photo Credit: Sarah Piantadosi)
While some people imploded in the lockdowns and isolation of the epidemic, others were thriving. “I felt like I’d been in training for this my whole life” says J Spaceman. He was referring to his fondness for isolation and when you reframe loneliness as “beautiful solitude” then it isn’t so bad. He would walk through an empty “Roman London” where “even the sirens had stopped singing” and where the world was “full of birdsong and strangeness and no contrails.” He used the birdsong walks to listen and try and make sense of all the music playing in his head. The mixes of his new record, a ninth studio album, weren’t working out yet.
Spaceman plays 16 different instruments on Everything Was Beautiful which was put down at 11 different studios, as well as at his home. He also employed more than 30 musicians and singers including his daughter Poppy, long-time collaborator and friend John Coxon, string and brass sections, choirs and finger bells and chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. So there’s a lot going on.
“There was so much information on it that the slightest move would unbalance it, but going around in circles is important to me. Not like you’re spiraling out of control but you’re going around and around and on each revolution you hold onto the good each time. Sure, you get mistakes as well, but you hold on to some of those too and that’s how you kind of… achieve. Well, you get there.”
Eventually the mixes got there and Everything Was Beautiful was achieved. The result is some of the most “live” sounding recordings that Spiritualized have released since the Live At The Albert Hall record of 1998, around the time of Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space.
The opening track “Always Together With You” is a reworking / supercharging of a track originally released in demo quality in 2014. This new version is a perfect Spiritualized song; a breathtaking, hard-edged, psychedelic pop tune where themes of high romance and space travel collide.
The artwork is designed once again with Mark Farrow. If you buy the vinyl you can pop a pill box out of the sleeve, revealing gold foil underneath, and assemble the Braille-embossed little thing and put it somewhere in the house. The box set has 8 of them. Literally a boxset. It looks more beautiful in the flesh. “Farrow and I were talking about what we should do and we just said, ‘It’s called Everything Is Beautiful, how could you not have a pill?’”
All these layers, all these details, the year-long mixes, the making sense of it all and the lives lived within these lyrics; for somebody so famously unconfident of his own abilities, isn’t this a punishing thing to keep doing? “Yeah, but I like what I do. There’s a line from Jonathan Meades that’s about having all the attributes to being an artist. ‘Paranoia, vanity, selfishness, egotism, sycophancy, resentment, moral nullity and more idiot than idiot savant.’ “And that’s what it feels like, this kind of thing. You’re your own worst enemy and biggest supporter. “There’s a ‘Of course this is worth it. It’s me’ and then this kind of deep doubt of ‘What the fuck is this all about?’ “And then ‘Why is it important?’ and then knowing there’s no easy answer. But it’s there. I know it’s there.”
Spiritualized North American Tour:
03/31/22 – Dallas, TX, – Granada Theater tickets
04/01/22 – Austin, TX – Scoot Inn tickets
04/03/22 – Santa Fe, NM – Meow Wolf tickets
04/04/22 – Denver, CO – Ogden Theatre tickets
04/05/22 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Commonwealth Room tickets
04/07/22 – Seattle, WA – Neptune tickets
04/08/22 – Portland, OR – Revolution Hall tickets
04/09/22 – Vancouver, BC – Commodore Ballroom tickets
04/11/22 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore tickets
04/12/22 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore tickets
04/14/22 – Solana Beach, CA – Belly Up Tavern tickets
04/17/22 – Tucson, AZ – Club Congress tickets
04/18/22 – Phoenix, AZ – Crescent Ballroom tickets
04/20/22 – Los Angeles, CA – Fonda Theatre tickets
04/21/22 – Big Sur, CA – Henry Miller Memorial Library tickets
04/22/22 – Indio, CA – Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
09/08/22 – Washington, DC – 9:30 Club tickets
09/09/22 – Chapel Hill, NC – Cat’s Cradle tickets
09/10/22 – Atlanta, GA – Variety Playhouse tickets
09/11/22 – Pelham, TN – The Caverns tickets
09/13/22 – Milwaukee, WI – Turner Hall Ballroom tickets
09/14/22 – Minneapolis, MN – Fine Line tickets
09/16/22 – Detroit, MI – Saint Andrew’s Hall tickets
09/18/22 – Toronto, ON – The Danforth Music Hall tickets
09/19/22 – Montreal, QC – Corona Theatre tickets
09/20/22 – Boston, MA – Royale tickets
09/22/22 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer tickets
09/23/22 – Jersey City, NJ – White Eagle Music Hall tickets
09/24/22 – New York, NY – Beacon Theatre tickets
Everything Was Beautiful artwork and tracklist:
1. Always Together With You
2. Best Thing You Never Had (The D Song)
3. Let It Bleed (For Iggy)
4. Crazy
5. The Mainline Song
6. The A Song (Laid In Your Arms)
7. I’m Coming Home Again