Zach Condon is back with a new album as Beirut, the follow-up to 2019’s Gallipoli. Hadsel, named after the island in northern Norway where he stayed in early 2020, is due out November 10 via Pompeii Records. “During my time in Hadsel, I worked hard on the music, lost in a trance and stumbling blindly through my own mental collapse that I had been pushing aside since I was a teenager,” Condon says. “It came and rang me like a bell. I was left agonising many things past and present while the beauty of the nature, the northern lights and fearsome storms played an awesome show around me. The few hours of light would expose the unfathomable beauty of the mountains and the fjords, and the hours-long twilights would fill me with subdued excitement. I’d like to believe that scenery is somehow present in the music.”
The first single is the richly orchestrated baroque pop track “So Many Plans.” Condon says, “I liked that this song struck a balance between the feelings of acceptance, hope and giving up. The lyric came from a covid-times lament that rolled effortlessly into a kind of short lullaby. The instruments were somewhat unusual for me at the time, having dusted off a baritone uke I never used before to join the album‘s primary instruments of either pump or church organ and the modular synthesizer as percussion and bass.” Hear it below.
BEIRUT – HADSEL TRACKLIST
Hadsel
Arctic Forest
Baion
So Many Plans
Melbu
Stokmarknes
Island Life
Spillhaugen
January 18th
Süddeutsches Ton-Bild-Studio
The Tern
Regulatory