New Spiritualized album due in February

Following this year’s reissues of their classic first four albums, Spiritualized announce news of their new studio album, Everything Was Beautiful, to be released Feb. 25 via Fat Possum and available to preorder here.

The band have shared a video for lead track and album opener “Always Together With You” – watch HERE – and announced a tour running from March through to May, including the following North American dates:

Mar 31, 2022 - Dallas, TX, Granada Theater
Apr 01, 2022 - Austin, TX - Scoot Inn
Apr 03, 2022 - Santa Fe, NM - Meow Wolf
Apr 04, 2022 - Denver, CO - Ogden Theatre
Apr 05, 2022 - Salt Lake City, UT - The Commonwealth Room
Apr 07, 2022 - Seattle, WA - Neptune
Apr 08, 2022 - Portland, OR - Revolution Hall
Apr 09, 2022 - Vancouver, BC - Commodore Ballroom

When it came to lockdowns and isolation during the epidemic, “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.

“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.”

Opening track “Always Together With You” is a reworking of a track originally released as a demo in 2014. This new version is hard edged, psychedelic pop with themes of romance and space travel.

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.

"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?

“I like what I do," he continues. "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.”

Track list:

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