Brooklyn indie-rock figureheads The Hold Steady have released a new song, "Denver Haircut," along with the announcement that fans can expect a new album, Thrashing Thru The Passion, on Aug. 16. The LP will include five new tracks, including the new one, and five previously released singles.
The forthcoming album is their seventh LP, and their first since 2014's Teeth Dreams. In a long statement on their Bandcamp page, the group, whose lineup consists of Craig Finn, Bobby Drake, Tad Kubler, Franz Nicolay, Galen Polivka and Steve Selvidge, explained how the album came together.
"Just after the New Year, we headed up to Woodstock to The Isokon studio to record some new songs. We were joined by producer Josh Kaufman and engineer D. James Goodwin, who have helped us record everything we've done for the past few years. It was a highly productive session, we pretty much just set up and cranked through the songs. The songs came together quickly and we were psyched on how they sounded," they wrote. They also spoke to the decision to make a somewhat non-traditional album (i.e. not all new music):
"We thought 'Denver Haircut' sounded like the first track on a record. 'Blackout Sam' sounded like it should close an album side. In fact, these five songs together sounded like a cool A side of an album. So, after D. James Goodwin mixed the songs, we decided to put them together with some of our favorite songs we'd recorded in the past few years and make it an album."
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The band will be performing several batches of shows in five cities late summer/fall. They will be bringing "Constructive Summer," to Seattle, Chicago, Boston and Nashville for three to four nights each. In December, the group will do four nights in their hometown for another round of "Massive Nights" at the Brooklyn Bowl. They also spoke to their non-traditional approach to touring in the same statement:
"A lot of things have changed since we started in 2003. We've changed the way we approach touring, opting for multi show weekends in bigger cities rather than the skullduggery of month long slogs. This is more realistic for where we are at now, and we've also found it to make the band much more musical. More of our time together is spent playing and performing music than setting up and taking down gear, driving it to the next place, setting it up again. Also, these runs of shows have reinforced what an amazing community exists around this band, and how it keeps growing. All in all, making this change to the way we approach shows has given a new life to the band. "
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