Tracey
Thorn
Record New album released
on March 2 on Merge Records
Tracey
Thorn reveals her new single "Queen," the first
song to be taken from her first solo album of entirely original
material in seven years. Titled Record,
the new album will be released on March 2. Watch the
Carol Morley-directed video for "Queen" now, and pre-order the
album on CD and smoky red Peak Vinyl in the Merge
store, where each format can be bundled with a beautiful
full-color Tracey Thorn zine featuring 20 pages of handwritten
lyrics and photos from the recording sessions. Record is also
available for pre-order through your preferred independent
record store and digital
music service.
Tracey
Thorn - Queen (Official Video)
Describing
"Queen," Tracey says: "It's a great opener for the album. Driven
along by Ewan Pearson's unashamedly glittering electro-pop production,
and drums and bass from Warpaint's Stella and Jenny, it features
me playing electric guitar for the first time in a while, and
singing my heart out."
As ever, the personal has often been political in Tracey Thorn's
work. "Nine feminist bangers," Tracey jokes when asked to describe
Record. If this album is in part about freedom and disenthrallment,
new single "Queen" is the opening broadside, all personal fire
and desire. Her voice, self-assured and richly textured yet
confessional and affecting, spits out the lyrics on Record
with a fresh, compelling drive and remains one of the finest
female pop voices of the last four decades.
Photo
Credit: Edward Bishop
"I
think I've always written songs which chronicle the milestones
of a woman's life," she says. "Different ages and stages, different
realities not often discussed in pop lyrics. If 2010's Love
and Its Opposite was my mid-life album-full of divorce
and hormones-then Record represents that sense of liberation
that comes in the aftermath, from embarking on a whole new 'no
fucks given' phase of life."
On Record, the synth-driven tracks arrive and leave with
a punchy sub-three-minute directness. "I wanted it to be a record
you'd listen to in the daytime," Tracey says. "On your headphones
or on the move. Not necessarily in the evening, or in your bedroom."
For all its no-fuss pop brevity, the album rotates around "Sister,"
a dubby nine-minute Compass Point-style disco jam where Tracey
is joined again by Warpaint's rhythm section and glorious backing
vocals from Corinne Bailey Rae.
Across four decades, Tracey's songs and writing have offered
up a clear-eyed woman's view of the immediate world around her,
from the acerbic teen love songs of her first early-eighties
band Marine Girls, through sixteen years as one half of articulate
multi-million-selling duo Everything But The Girl, to her recent
acclaimed memoirs and journalism.