Gruff Rhys Seeking New Gods LP (Green Vinyl)

Gruff Rhys releases his new album Seeking New Gods through Rough Trade Records. This is Gruff's seventh solo album. Seeking New Gods was recorded following a US tour with his band and mixed in LA with superstar producer Mario C (Beastie Boys).

The album concept was originally driven to be the biography of a mountain, Mount Paektu (an East Asian active volcano). However, as Gruff's writing began to reflect on the inhuman timescale of a peak's existence and the intimate features that bring it to mythological life, both the songs and the mountain became more and more personal.

"The album is about people and the civilizations, and the spaces people inhabit over periods of time. How people come and go but the geology sticks around and changes more slowly. I think it's about memory and time," he suggests of Seeking New Gods' meaning. "It's still a biography of a mountain, but now it's a Mount Paektu of the mind. You won't learn much about the real mountain from listening to this record but you will feel something, hopefully."

Super Furry Animals leader Gruff Rhys wrote his latest, and arguably his best, solo album thinking on a macro scale. Using Mount Paektu, an active volcano in North Korea, as his guide, he crafted a suite of songs wrestling with the human race's tiny place on both the planet we call home and within the universe as a whole. I'll give you a minute to recover from the existential shudder that idea may have set off within you. And when you do, encourage you to track down a copy of this marvelous album. Rhys and his backing band, including former Flaming Lips member Kliph Scurlock on drums and the secret star of this show Steve Black on bass guitar, fearlessly dance on the lip of this particular volcano with bouncy tunes that roll and churn like the members of Argent covering The Zombies' Odessey & Oracle. For Rhys's part, he sounds like he's been listening to the ancient myths surrounding this peak and finding within them deep connections to our modern biases and desires. All of us, in our small and large ways, are seeing some kind of explanation for how we got here and what comes next after we breathe our last. Rhys makes that search feel exciting and downright hopeful.