I LIKE TRAINS are back.
The group have completed work on their first album in eight years, adding another chapter to that heavyweight catalogue.
New LP 'KOMPROMAT' lands on August 21st, and it's seemingly fuelled by political paranoia and a deep distrust of the state.
“An I LIKE TRAINS record doesn’t really start to take shape until there’s a theme”, says the group’s vocalist and lyricist David Martin. “That point came following Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks in 2013.”
Out this summer, the album is trailed by new song 'The Truth', which comes combined with a subversive video 'starring' Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.
“This was one of the final tracks to come together for the album,” vocalist David Martin explains. “It came from a list I was keeping over a number of months. I would follow the news and social media and add a line or two a day, so that it ended up plotting the news cycle over that period.”
“The amount of information we’re fed on a daily basis is enormous. Everyone is so keen to 'break' the news as quickly as possible, that it becomes impossible to comprehend it, and draw a meaningful narrative through it. How does this event connect to that one? Who gains what because this happened? Who is missing out? It’s exhausting.”
Leeds born artist and designer Michael Connolly crafts the video, a deep fake karaoke clip. He says:
“The track is relentless and I wanted the film to feel the same. Claustrophobia and confusion were my watch words…” “I wanted the film to go beyond the standard music video 'archive footage' edit. I combined deepfakes, distorted visuals, and digital découpé techniques to create an intense level of disorientation. I feel this really gives the film it's own weird paranoid trippy nightmare world – it sums up the last four years in geopolitics pretty well for me.”
Tune in now.
Photo Credit: Ben Bentley
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