Phoenix have announced their first album in five years. Alpha Zulu is due out November 4 via Loyaute/Glassnote. The follow-up to 2017’s Ti Amo was self-produced by Phoenix and recorded in Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which is located in the Palais du Louvre. Today, the band have released Alpha Zulu’s latest single “Tonight,” which is a duet with Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. Phoenix have also shared an Oscar Boyson-directed visual for the song. Watch it below, and scroll down for the album art and tracklist.
“Tonight” marks the first time Phoenix have enlisted a guest vocalist on a song. The accompanying music video was shot in Tokyo and Paris, partly within their Musée des Arts Décoratifs studio. “We felt it would be a fantastic adventure to create something out of nothing in a museum,” the band’s Laurent “Branco” Brancowitz said in press materials about the space. “And so with the pandemic, we could live exactly this scene, to be alone in an empty museum.”
“I was a bit afraid, when there was too much beauty around us, that to create something could be a bit hard,” Christian Mazzalai added. “But it was the opposite: we couldn’t stop producing music. In these first 10 days, we wrote almost all of the album.” Deck d’Arcy noted that “the backstage of the museum is like a mashup. It’s very pop in a way—like how we make music.”
Phoenix shared Alpha Zulu’s title track earlier this year. In 2020, they released the single “Identical,” which appeared in Sofia Coppola’s recent movie On the Rocks (Coppola and Phoenix’s Thomas Mars are married). In 2019, the band released a book, titled Phoenix: Liberté, Égalité, Phoenix!
Alpha Zulu was largely inspired by the band’s late friend and collaborator Philippe Zdar, who died in 2019. “We lost more than ever, almost,” Christian said of Zdar. “We had many moments where we could feel his ideas. Jeté, that’s a word he would say, when you’re throwing something very fast.”
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Alpha Zulu: