Music News

Mercury Prize-winning, multiple GRAMMY and BRIT Award-nominated band alt-J have announced their eagerly awaited fourth studio album The Dream, set for release on 11 February 2022.

The band’s revelatory new single ‘U&ME’ is out now. ‘U&ME’ is the first new music from alt-J since their acclaimed third album RELAXER in 2017.

Directed by band member Gus’ brother Prosper Unger-Hamilton, the video for ‘U&ME’ is the first to feature the full band. It’s an evocative video that recalls treasured memories and captures the band in full flow during long summer days. Watch the video for ‘U&ME’ here.

‘U&ME’ is arguably alt-J’s most beautiful and honest song to date, unfurling gracefully, with new elements being subtly folded into the mix until a euphoric breakdown cracks through the middle. Lead vocalist Newman moves between blissful euphoria and artful restraint, telling a love story through snapshot memories, as the song channels the band’s unparalleled experimentation into a song that is underpinned with a raw sense of joy.

The track was written during various soundchecks across the globe, when the band got back to London and heard the recordings they knew it was one of their most dynamic recordings to date. Speaking on the process, Joe Newman says, “it gathered momentum on it’s own, it was best to just get out of its way. We were just there.”

‘U&ME’ was written about a day Joe Newman spent at Sun Cycle Festival in Melbourne. Elaborating on the meaning of the song, Gus Unger-Hamilton says, “it’s about being at a festival with your best friends, having a good time, togetherness, and the feeling in life that nothing could be any better than it is right now”.

The Dream is an album where true-crime inspired stories and tales of Hollywood and the Chateau Marmont rub shoulders with some of the band’s more personal moments to-date. Both beauty and darkness lay side-by-side – often seamlessly merging on the same track, a purposeful choice that pays dividends across the record. The band’s dazzling instrumentation has matured; there are still far out moments, but now they are deployed with an artful precision.

The Dream is an album of intrigue, beauty and humanity – a coalescence of everything that has made alt-J a global band with true staying power. The album was created after a period of rest for the band following their seismic world tour in support of previous record RELAXER. It is a record that is the sound of a band growing as songwriters and storytellers.

The Dream will be available on a variety of formats across CD and vinyl, plus digital download and streaming. There is a limited-edition hardback book CD with reproductions of the notebook that Joe Newman used to write the lyrics for The Dream, with his original handwritten lyrics and drawings. There is also transparent violet vinyl, clear vinyl, 180g heavyweight black vinyl and a standard CD available.

alt-J are one of the most successful British bands of the millennium. Joe Newman, Gus Unger-Hamilton and Thom Green have released three studio albums that, between them, have sold in excess of two million copies with two and a half billion streams. Their 2012 Mercury Prize and Ivor Novello Award-winning debut An Awesome Wave was followed two years later by their GRAMMY and BRIT Award-nominated album This Is All Yours. Released in 2017, RELAXER flew straight into the top 10 of the Australian and UK album chart and became their second album to be nominated for the Mercury Prize.

Few artists find a unique voice and even fewer remain committed to it, but with insatiable ambition, Boys Noize turned principled dedication into an outsize presence among 21st century DJs and electronic musicians. A career punctuated by audacious cross-genre exploration has earned him an enviable fluidity of practice across borders and scenes, yet his definitive fingerprints are present on every creation. An underground hero with mainstream appeal and acid-dripped, techno-punk sensibilities, he jumpstarts crowds from Berghain to Coachella. Boys Noize’s fascination with traversing dualities hits a new apex on +/-.

“The album dives into the polar tension between the musical styles and worlds I find myself in,” says Alex Ridha. “When you combine opposites, something transcendent can take place, something greater than the two parts. And with music, it becomes a magic that can create new worlds.”

The collective volume and diversity of Boys Noize has put him in high demand among artists seeking his proprietary sonic techniques and peerless production. Berlin’s world-renowned subterranean culture acts as a beacon for international stars who are willing to probe the margins for the innovative and unusual, and it is Boys Noize’s studio where their fresh inspirations are transmuted into even fresher music with his expertise. Over the years, working relationships have flourished and production credits multiplied, including with such luminaries as Lady Gaga, Frank Ocean, A$AP ROCKY, Bon Iver, Mark Ronson and Francis & The Lights. And as an unrivalled remixer, Boys Noize has been enlisted by Depeche Mode, Rammstein, Daft Punk and David Lynch, adding his signature to the work of artistic royalty. Even while personally embracing an outsider role, Boys Noize finds his influence penetrating the center: 2020 was marked by a GRAMMY nomination for his collaboration with Skrillex and Ty Dolla $ign ‘Midnight Hour’—an unlikely blend of late-night R&B, oldskool rave and hard house—while 2021 brought a GRAMMY win for Lady Gaga’s ‘Rain On Me’, feat. Ariana Grande.

“I’ve always been inspired by trying to integrate opposing, polar forces,” says Ridha. “There’s something really thrilling in it, and it’s always a secret motivation for me; building and exploring the combination of contrasts. Techno’s earliest inspiration was the idea of combining man and machine. And you can continue from there—aggression and beauty, past and future…”

+/- encapsulates a distillation of his career-to-date in waveform shape, where valleys of subterranean techno, industrial and jacking house transition into peaks of star-driven collaborations. Backed by the club adept’s battering beats and cloaked in deep, immersive textures, the songs, while rich, possess a mean bite – even +/-’s most melodic moments bare the sharpened teeth of Boys Noize’s modular synthesis and processing; a new breakthrough for the gear lover.