Wilco announce new double album, ‘Cruel Country’
nme.comWilco have announced that they’ll be releasing a new double-disc album next month called ‘Cruel Country’.The band’s 12th studio album is set to arrive on May 27 via dBpm Records.
This is the same weekend as their Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, MA, where the band will perform the new record for the first time.The title was inspired by the idea that Wilco were a country band when they first started out. “There have been elements of country music in everything we’ve ever done,” frontman Jeff Tweedy said in a press release. “We’ve never been particularly comfortable with accepting that definition, the idea that I was making country music.“But now, having been around the block a few times, we’re finding it exhilarating to free ourselves within the form, and embrace the simple limitation of calling the music we’re making country.”Comprising of 21 tracks total, ‘Cruel Country’ was created with all six members together in The Loft in Chicago for the first time since the 2011’s ‘The Whole Love’, and it’s made up of almost entirely live takes.“It’s a style of recording that forces a band to surrender control and learn to trust each other, along with each others’ imperfections, musical and otherwise,” Tweedy said. “But when it’s working the way it’s supposed to, it feels like gathering around some wild collective instrument, one that requires six sets of hands to play.”You can check out the album’s lead single, ‘Falling Apart’, below:As for subject matters on the new album, Tweedy explained that there’s a loose conceptual narrative on the history of the United States.“It isn’t always direct and easy to spot, but there are flashes of clarity,” Tweedy said. “It’s all mixed up and mixed in, the way my personal feelings about.
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