It seems that Battles have finally completed their follow-up to the 2007 indie-darling Mirrored. In an interview with Pitchfork, Dave Konopka spoke about the band’s recording of the currently title-less record, due in early summer on Warp.
When asked about Tyondai Braxton’s departure, Konopka revealed:
the situation was kind of dark. The three of us argued and were pissed off after Ty left but we were like, “Fuck that. That’s chapter’s closed. Let’s move on.” From there, the most important thing was to maintain the integrity of what the band means to us and to carry on with it. When Ty left over the summer, we were close to having an album’s worth of material– we had put so much energy into the project and then we had to re-establish ourselves as a three-piece. The end result is a culmination of reworked things we’d been putting together the past couple years and some newer songs.
Konopka added this when describing the new album;
There’s a good spectrum– some shorter songs, some poppier songs, some total rock songs, some more out-there songs, some manic songs, a semi hip-hop-vibe song.
There’s one called “Inchworm” that’s based on a four-hour jam I did by myself in our practice space– which reminds me of this guy upstairs from our space who kept knocking on our door and losing his shit. He’d go, “You guys are driving me… “– and his voice started cracking because he was so angry– “fucking insane.” He was like, “It sounds like you’re dropping a fucking anvil down here! I don’t know what type of music this is but even people that like your music don’t like your music!” So maybe that gives you an indication of how good this album is going to be.
Check out the full interview here and look for the record in a couple months.
