After a series of epic, sprawling and headphones-friendly albums, June 16, 2023 will see Motorpsycho return with a short, reasonably pop-formatted and intimate album of mainly acoustically based songs. Yay! marks Motorpsycho's 31st album, and will be released via Stickman Records and in Scandinavia & UK through Motorpsycho's own label Det Nordenfjeldske Grammofonselskab. Coming as CD, and red and black LP vinyl edition, the pre-sale has just started at THIS LOCATION!
For once playing the game instead of trying to reinvent it, this 10-song album of tunes is clearly a reaction in some way to too much architecture and too many grand visions, and dials the music down to more comprehensive and digestible sizes than have been the band's métier lately.
Motorpsycho have always been about the balance between hard and soft, electric and acoustic, big and small, light and shade … and now the time was right for a lighter touch to balance the scales. Yang to the Yin of earlier, more epic works (N.O.X., The Crucible, and Chariot Of The Gods), this is also an album that is relatively easy on the ears, and that actually works really well with a cup of tea at noon.
A first single, entitled "Patterns", is now streaming online. A report from the darkest days of Covid (read a full and in-depth statement by the band about the making of Yay! HERE), this melancholy song combines Motorpsycho's trademarked dense guitar walls with naked lyrics sung with unusually great tenderness by someone who’s been there and understands the words. With a fantastic retro-futuristic neo-psychedelic production, this is a song to drown in. Listen to "Patterns", now available on all digital streaming services HERE!
Yay! was produced by Reine Fiske and Lars Fredrik Swahn (Dungen, Melody’s Echo Chamber, The Amazing et al), and their production work brings a sweet Swedish psych edge to the album, giving it a lysergic tinge and charging what could easily have been a bit too ‘’backporchy'' with an electric vibe that lifts it out of the often staid singer/songwriter genre, but still keeping the intimacy intact.
While as ever clearly drawing on inspiration from late 60s/early 70s heroes, Yay! is as indebted to earlier iterations of Motorpsycho as anything else, and will be recognizable to fans of vintage Motorpsychodelia as well as a breath of fresh air to newer Psychonauts that only ever heard the heavy progressive side of the band.
Keeping things unpredictable and weird since 1989, there is only one Motorpsycho. Yay