XIU XIU IS BACK
Jamie Stweart has been busy lately. His band, Xiu Xiu, is ready to reveal their latest full-length album Angel Guts: Red Classroom, out February 4th on Polyvinyl in North America and Bella Union in Europe. The record is Xiu Xiu’s first album of original material since 2012’s Always. The band have also just unveiled the first single, Stupid in the Dark, which you can listen to below. The album comes on the heels of NINA, Xiu Xiu’s collection of Nina Simone covers set for release Dec. 2nd on Graveface Records.
Having spent the previous four years living in North Carolina, Jamie Stewart relocated to Los Angeles, moving blindly into a neighborhood whose notoriously dangerous reputation was unknown to him.
A park divided among four gangs, a lake routinely dragged for bodies, a building wherein two infant skeletons were recently uncovered — the aura of his new home bleeds into every pore of the album, each lyric and note bearing traces of its essence: the terrible beauty, the despair, the violence, the ultra humanity, the uncertainty.
“I know to a degree I must have romanticized it,” Stewart admits, “But when it’s not safe to go out at night, what else can one?”
Listen to “Stupid In The Dark” below.