The acclaimed Canadian post-rock outfit Godspeed You! Black Emperor have announced a new album called G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!, due for release on April 2nd through Constellation Records. It marks the group’s seventh full-length to date and arrives four years after their previous LP, 2017’s Luciferian Towers.
“we wrote it on the road mostly. when that was still a place. and then recorded it in masks later, distanced at the beginning of the second wave,” GY!BE said in a statement announcing the album’s release. “it was autumn, and the falling sun was impossibly fat and orange. we tried to summon a brighter reckoning there, bent beneath varied states of discomfort, worry and wonderment.”
“this record is about all of us waiting for the end. all current forms of governance are failed. this record is about all of us waiting for the beginning, and is informed by the following demands= empty the prisons take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise. end the forever wars and all other forms of imperialism. tax the rich until they’re impoverished.”
You can read GS!YBE’s full statement about the album below.
STATE’S END! was recorded and mixed in October 2020 at GY!BE’s homebase studio Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango in Montreal by Jace Lasek (of The Besnard Lakes). In its own statement, Constellation Records describes the album as “two riveting 20-minute side-length trajectories of noise-drenched widescreen post-rock: inexorable chug blossoms into blown-out twang, as some of the band’s most soaring, searing melodies ricochet and converge amidst violin and bassline counterpoint. Field recordings and roiling semi-improvised passages frame these fervent epics, and two shorter self-contained 6-minute pieces find the band at its most devastatingly beautiful, haunting and elegiac.”
Pre-orders for STATE’S END are now ongoing. The album’s artwork (seen below) is an illustration by William Schmiechen.
There will be advanced singles ahead of the album’s release. Instead, GS!YE has sent an advanced 10-inch to 100+ independent record stores and invites them “to share clips of this music spinning in their stores or homes or wherever they find themselves with a turntable, in isolation or otherwise.”
Update: On March 27th at 6pm ET, GS!YE will present a visual album premiere of G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!. Take place at an empty theater in Montreal, the event will feature a full presentation of the album alongside a 16mm film spooling dozens of loops & short reels.
G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! Artwork:
G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! Tracklist:
12 A
A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) (4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz) / Job’s Lament / First of the Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY)
[20:22]
10A
Fire at Static Valley
[5:58]
12B
“GOVERNMENT CAME” (9980.0kHz 3617.1kHz 4521.0 kHz) / Cliffs Gaze / cliffs’ gaze at empty waters’ rise / ASHES TO SEA or NEARER TO THEE
[19:48]
10B
OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (for D.H.)
[6:30]
GS!YE’s Statement on G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!:
we wrote it on the road mostly. when that was still a place.
and then recorded it in masks later, distanced at the beginning of the second wave.
it was autumn, and the falling sun was impossibly fat and orange.
we tried to summon a brighter reckoning there,
bent beneath varied states of discomfort, worry and wonderment.
we fired up the shortwave radios again, for the first time in a long time.
and found that many things had changed.
the apocalypse pastors were still there, but yelling END TIMES NOW where they once yelled “end times soon”.
and the transmission-detritus of automated militaries takes up more bandwidth now,
so that a lot of frequencies are just pulses of rising white static,
digital codexes announcing the status of various watching and killing machines.
and the ham-radio dads talk to each other all night long.
about their dying wives and what they ate for lunch and what they’ll do with their guns when antifa comes.
this record is about all of us waiting for the end.
all current forms of governance are failed.
this record is about all of us waiting for the beginning,
and is informed by the following demands=
empty the prisons
take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise.
end the forever wars and all other forms of imperialism.
tax the rich until they’re impoverished.
much love to all the other lost and lovely ones,
these are death-times and our side has to win.
we’ll see you on the road once the numbers fall.
xoxoxox god’s pee
montreal, quebec, kanada
1 march, 2021
