“Continue as a Guest,” the new album from The New Pornographers, is set for release on March 31 via Merge Records — their first for the label. The first single, “Really Really Light,” is out with an accompanying video directed by Christian Cerezo.
In celebration of the new album, The New Pornographers are set for a run of U.S. shows this spring, with support from Wild Pink. The dates include performances at New York’s Brooklyn Steel on May 17. A portion of proceeds from presale tickets sold via the band’s website will be donated to abortion rights organization Frontera Fund.
A co-write with Dan Bejar of Destroyer, “Really Really Light” is a refashioning of a cutting-room-floor track from the band’s acclaimed 2014 album Brill Bruisers. “Part of my process throughout the years has been messing with things I never finished. I really liked Dan’s chorus, and for a while I was just trying to write something that I felt like belonged with it,” A.C. Newman shared. “I was thinking of the Aloe Blacc song ‘The Man’ which interpolated the chorus from Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ and thought it would be fun to interpolate a song that no one knows. Not trying to sound like Aloe Blacc, just doing some interpolating of my own. It became a game of writing a verse that felt like a part of the same song. In my mind, I was striving for a little Jeff Lynne–era Tom Petty, a classic go-to.”
Newman began work on “Continue as a Guest” at his Woodstock, New York home over the course of a year, after the band had just finished touring behind 2019’s “In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights.” During the writing and recording process, he discovered new lyrical, artistic and sonic approaches experimenting with his own vocal register.
The 10-track record is produced by Newman and features compatriots Neko Case, Kathryn Calder, John Collins, Todd Fancey, and Joe Seiders as well as contributions from saxophonist Zach Djanikian and in addition to the Bejar co-write, glimmering track “Firework in the Falling Snow” was co-penned by Sadie Dupuis.
The album tackles themes of isolation and collapse, following the ambivalence of day-to-day life during the pandemic and the endless pitfalls of living online. But Newman says that “Continue as a Guest’s” title track also addresses the continually rolling concerns that come with being in a band for so long. “The idea of continuing as a guest felt very apropos to the times,” he explained. “Feeling out of place in culture, in society — not feeling like a part of any zeitgeist, but happy to be separate and living your simple life, your long fade-out. Find your own little nowhere, find some space to fall apart, continue as a guest.”