To celebrate a fantastic year at 4AD, we're offering a 25% discount across our catalogue* until 8th December.
Just use 4ADEOY25OFF at checkout.
Get started by exploring our 2019 releases here
.*Excluding pre-orders, boxsets, and all Gene Clark formats.
Released in January, Deerhunter's eighth LP Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? forgets the questions and makes up unrelated answers. It gets up, walks around, it records itself in several strategic geographic points across North America. It comes home, restructures itself and goes back to bed to avoid the bad news.
Running parallel to Daughter, Elena Tonra assumed the pseudonym Ex:Re (pronounced ex ray) for her eponymously-titled debut solo album, a deeply personal record that was made with both a sense of urgency and a cathartic need.
Tonra's candid solo songs document the time after a relationship ended and are written like unsent letters. Taking on a creative moniker, she chose Ex:Re to mean 'regarding ex' and also 'X-Ray' as a way to look inside and see what is really there. Writing took a year but the recording process lasted mere months, turning to Fabian Prynn (4AD's in-house engineer and producer) and composer Josephine Stephenson on cello to help bring Ex:Re to life.
The 12-track Gallipoli started life in the winter of 2016, with Zach Condon returning to his old Farfisa organ, the same one used to write the first two Beirut albums (2006's Gulag Orkestar and the following year's The Flying Club Cup), which he inherited from a traveling circus when he was a teenager. Following recording stints in New York and Berlin (where he now calls home), Condon settled in Sudestudio, a studio complex deep in rural Puglia, southern Italy. It was here that he rediscovered the old joys of music as a visceral experience which became the founding principle for Gallipoli.
Written, produced and performed by lead singer Jake Webb, mixed by Marta Salogni and mastered by Heba Kadry, Triage was recorded in Webb's home studio in West Perth, Australia.
With the creation of this album, Webb felt a sense of closure - completing the triptych of his three releases. Methyl Ethel has always been a surrealist outfit - a dark and obscured expression of life set to the backdrop of dream pop hooks. But Triage is a more reflective album - one that explores the notion of coming of age, only to reference it for the snapshots and passing memories that it has become.
Tune-Yards' official score for Boots Riley's acclaimed directorial debut Sorry To Bother You follows the 2018 release of Sorry To Bother You: The Soundtrack, by The Coup. Riley described the score as "the film's musical voice" and explains the difference between the score and the soundtrack: "The characters can't hear [the score]; the soundtrack, the characters can [hear]."
The score also includes dialogue samples from the film and four bonus tracks never before heard in the film. The bonus tracks feature up-and-coming Oakland artists including Chhoti Maa as well as Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truthspeaker.
Rema-Rema featured former members of The Models and Siouxsie and The Banshees, and their much-loved Wheel in the Roses EP (1980) was among the first records to be released on 4AD. Their only contribution to the label, they split-up just before its release, going on to form or join bands as diverse as Renegade Soundwave, The Wolfgang Press, Mass, and Adam and the Ants.
The debut album that never was, Fond Reflections, comes almost forty years after their debut EP and has been culled from the band's rich archive of reel-to-reel and cassette recordings, with member Gary Asquith and mixing engineer Takatsuna Mukai painstakingly working on them to make this collection as cohesive as possible.
Listen and buy here
Listen to 'Rema-Rema (Halligans Live Rehearsal Version)'
Designer finds the New Zealander artist hitting her creative stride. After the sleeper success of Party (internationally lauded and crowned Rough Trade Shop's Album of 2017), Harding came off a 100-date tour last summer and went straight into the studio with a collection of songs written on the road. Reuniting with John Parish, producer of Party, Harding spent 15 days recording and 10 days mixing at Rockfield Studios, Monmouth and Bristol's J&J Studio and Playpen.
From the bold strokes of opening track 'Fixture Picture', there is an overriding sense of an artist confident in their work, with contributions from Huw Evans (H. Hawkline), Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo), drummer Gwion Llewelyn and violinist Clare Mactaggart broadening and complimenting Harding's rich and timeless songwriting.
Their first of two exquisite 2019 albums, Big Thief's U.F.O.F. was recorded in rural western Washington at Bear Creek Studios. In a large cabin-like room, the band set up their gear to track live with engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who was also behind their previous albums. Having already lived these songs on tour, they were relaxed and ready to experiment. The raw material came quickly. Some songs were written only hours before recording and stretched out instantly, first take, vocals and all.
"Making friends with the unknown... All my songs are about this," says Adrianne Lenker; "If the nature of life is change and impermanence, I'd rather be uncomfortably awake in that truth than lost in denial."
On 3rd September 2017, director Mike Mills emailed Matt Berninger to introduce himself and in very short order, the most ambitious project of the National's nearly 20-year career was born and plans for a hard-earned vacation died. The Los Angeles-based filmmaker was coming off his third feature, 20th Century Women, and was interested in working with the band on... something. A video maybe. Berninger, already a fan of Mills' films, not only agreed to collaborate, he essentially handed over the keys to the band's creative process.
The result is I Am Easy to Find, a 24-minute film by Mills starring Alicia Vikander, and I Am Easy to Find, a 68-minute album by the National. The former is not the video for the latter; the latter is not the soundtrack to the former. The two projects are, as Mills calls them, "Playfully hostile siblings that love to steal from each other" -- they share music and words and DNA and impulses and a vision about what it means to be human in 2019, but don't necessarily need one another. The movie was composed like a piece of music; the music was assembled like a film, by a film director. The frontman and natural focal point was deliberately and dramatically sidestaged in favour of a variety of female voices, nearly all of whom have long been in the group's orbit. It is unlike anything either artist has ever attempted and also totally in line with how they've created for much of their careers.
PROTO makes reference to what Holly Herndon refers to as the protocol era, where rapidly surfacing ideological battles over the future of A.I. protocols, centralised and decentralised internet protocols, and personal and political protocols compel us to ask ourselves who are we,what are we, what do we stand for, and what are we heading towards?
PROTO isn't about A.I., but much of it was created in collaboration with her own A.I. 'baby', Spawn. In addition to Spawn, Holly assembled a contemporary ensemble of vocalists, developers, and guest contributors (Jenna Sutela, Jlin, Lily Anna Haynes, Martine Syms) to create a record that encompasses live vocal processing and timeless folk singing, and places an emphasis on alien song craft and new forms of communion.
Since her arrival in 2012, Holly has successfully mined the edges of electronic and Avant Garde pop and emerged with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own, all while studying for her newly completed PhD at Stanford University, researching machine learning and music. Her LP Platform closed out 2015 by gracing year-end lists from Pitchfork, The Guardian, NME, and The Wire. In the aftermath, Radiohead hand-picked her to open up their European tour.
Hannah Rodgers's second studio record is a series of poetic examinations of love across the experiential spectrum, set to a soundtrack that mixes electronic pop and grungy guitar rock with aplomb.
Small Mercies follows the 24 year-old's debut album, The Age Of Anxiety (2017) - an unsettling synth-pop record fuelled by Pixx's own debilitating experience of angst - and 2015's forlorn and folk-edged Fall In EP. Co-produced by Simon Byrt (who worked on both her EP and debut album) and Dan Carey, it sees Pixx assuming different personas to examine the damage done by religion, gender-based power hierarchies and stereotypes, the tipping point of Earth's destruction and love.
In late Summer, Minneapolis-born R&B experimentalist Velvet Negroni released his debut album on 4AD.
On NEON BROWN, he is a griot relaying the life and times of his own island of one as he rhymes in double time, or hiccups and la-las through a break, or croons from a room down the hall. As it unfolds into another story of lost love, or another joke about lost drugs, as it tries to make sense of a life spent in the (sometimes harrowing) pursuit of communion. Longtime collaborators Psymun (Future, Young Thug, Juice WRLD, The Weeknd) and Tickle Torture produced the album.
Raised in an outer suburb of the Twin Cities, Jeremy Nutzman - a black kid adopted into a white evangelical Christian family - savored the secular pop music he could only hear as a kid during ice skating competitions. Years later, his refreshingly raw approach to R&B has notched him writing credits for Kanye West and Kid Cudi, plus two features on Bon Iver's latest album. He also wrapped an arena tour supporting Tame Impala, including two nights at Madison Square Garden.
Efterklang have released their fifth studio album Altid Sammen, their first release in their native Danish. The album, whose title translates to "always together," arrives seven years after their previous album, Piramida.
Deep and sonorous, Altid Sammen is steeped in the sonic experimentation that has long been their trademark since Tripper, the Danes' 2004 debut. As bold and ambitious in scope as their last collection of songs, Casper Clausen (vocals), Mads Brauer (synths, electronics) and Rasmus Stolberg (bass) have taken another creative U-turn, this time fusing baroque instrumentation with their signature expansive sound.
"Altid Sammen's songs are about belief and togetherness," Clausen says. "Not in a religious way - none of us are believers of a defined religion. The words are searching for meaning in intimate relationships, in nature, in death and eternity. The bonds we create; to gather, hold hands, sing or share a moment together. We're all connected, across nations, age, sex and gender. We come together with all of our backgrounds, and we move apart in all sorts of directions, always together."
No Other, the stunning record by Gene Clark, was finally reissued on 4AD in November - giving the masterpiece the treatment it deserves.
Recorded at the Village Recorder in West Hollywood and produced by Thomas Jefferson Kaye, No Other was originally released in 1974 on Asylum Records, coming a year after the Byrds short-lived reunion. Reaching for the stars, Gene delivered a visionary record of psychedelic rock, folk, country and soul which famously cost a small fortune to make ("It took a lot of time in the studio before we could actually get the songs to the point we wanted them," Gene said in 1977). Although warmly received by critics, No Other was a commercial failure and was subsequently deleted shortly after.
However, as The New York Times wrote around the record's 40th anniversary in 2014, "hindsight has burnished No Other, as it has redeemed other albums that went on to be reconstructed as rock repertory, like Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers and Lou Reed's Berlin," with No Other now being increasingly recognised as one of the greatest of its time, if not all time.
The original tapes have been remastered at Abbey Road, a stunning 5.1 Surround mix of this album created for the first time (done by Neil Wilkes & B.J. Cole at Opus Productions), and both the in the studio and promotional photoshoots have been located. Furthermore, all the studio takes have been forensically worked on and mixed by the duo of Gene Clark aficionado, author and Long Ryders frontman Sid Griffin and John Wood, the producer famed for his work with the likes of Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny. More than just bonus material, these tracks offer fans an insight in to how Gene approached recording No Other; no track has been edited or composited in any way, allowing for things to be heard exactly as they went down in the studio and before any overdubbing took place.
In October Big Thief released their second phenomenal album of the year.
While some have looked on in wonderment at this prolific band's decision to release two substantial releases in the same year, the decision was, as with every decision the band makes, eminently intentional and deeply considered.
Two Hands is a partner to U.F.O.F.
In Stereogum's recent cover story on the band, Adrianne Lenker beautifully describes how the two albums connect and how they differ: "U.F.O.F. is meant to be more focused on the immeasurable, sort of suspended ethereal playing with textures and colors and layering in the production, staring out into the abyss. And Two Hands is more the micro, zooming into the blood and tissue and guts of being a human, the raw, bare, naked bones, not much layering, capturing just our performances in the room, just very dry, no reverbs, just skin and flesh and human, finite, physical. But I think each of them contains parts of the others."
Built on top of a retro drum groove and hypnotic bass line, Spencer.'s 4AD debut release is a magnetic gem full of confidence and swagger, an absolute earworm begging for repeat listens. The much-buzzed about 20 year old genre-defying artist melds R&B in his velvety vocals, hip-hop in his off-kilter beats, funk in his effervescent basslines, and moody indie rock in his reverb-soaked guitar. The song is paired with a video chronicling a young love from its beginning to end directed by Danica Arias Kleinknecht.
The new single is off a forthcoming 2020 project.
In February 2020, Grimes releases her highly anticipated new album Miss Anthropocene. 2019 saw the release of a number of singles, including her return with 'Violence'.