SBTRKT announces first album in seven years, ‘The Rat Road’

nme.com:

SBTRKT has returned with details of his fourth album ‘The Rat Road’ alongside sharing its first single, ‘Waiting’ (feat. Teezo Touchdown).The follow-up to Aaron Jerome’s 2016 album ‘SAVE YOURSELF’ arrives on May 5 and is available to pre-order/pre-save here.‘Waiting’ hears the musician and producer experiment with a different sound from his earlier, bombastic electronic outings.“I’m always listening to and looking out for new music – and came across a song of Teezo’s ‘I’m Just A Fan’ – in Oct ’21,” Jerome explained of collaborating with Touchdown for the album’s first single.“By serendipity [Touchdown] was heading to London the next week so we connected in person.

In some ways – although personal to Teezo too – it perfectly vocalised everything I had been going through,” he said.Speaking about his forthcoming LP, Jerome added: “This album has been my most sonically ambitious record to create – following my own musical path – which isn’t based on others’ perceptions of what SBTRKT should be.“‘The Rat Road’ title is a play on the concept of ‘the rat race’.

It’s partly based on my own challenging experiences within the music industry and life generally – though I realised the idea is not isolated from a much wider feeling of exhaustion – definitely true here in the UK with little sense of respite from ever increasing costs/decreasing opportunity/and a bold divide-and-conquer mentality.“There is the juxtaposition in the record between determination and hopelessness.”SBTRKT has released three albums to date: 2011’s ‘SBTRKT‘, 2014’s ‘Wonder Where We Land‘, and 2016’s ‘SAVE YOURSELF’.The artist’s rose to popularity in the early 2010s with releases including ‘Wildfire‘ featuring Little Dragon.