The World In Air Quotes is The God In Hackney’s third album. It’s an album that resonates with the anxieties of the moment—feelings about climate change, isolation, extinction, the social impact of technology, the flattening of history—and illuminates the darkness with laughter and surreal imagination.
For The World in Air Quotes, the core God in Hackney quartet of Andy Cooke, Dan Fox, Ashley Marlowe and Nathaniel Mellors has expanded its lineup to include American multi-instrumentalists and composers Eve Essex (Eve Essex & The Fabulous Truth, Das Audit, Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra, Peter Zummo, Liturgy) and Kelly Pratt (Father John Misty, David Byrne/St Vincent, Beirut, and Lonnie Holley among many others), signalling a new and ambitious direction for the band. The album cover features artwork by Iranian-American artist Tala Madani, recently the subject of a career survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
The album opens with “In the Face of a New Science,” a widescreen anthem—big guitars, a horn section, urgent drums—about our changing planet, after which the band immediately switches up its palette to the electronic, dub-meets-r’n’b-meets-industrial-goes-goth of ‘Heaven & Black Water’. This is followed by the strange, oceanic ‘Bardo!’, a fusion of savage, skronking jazz and submarine-propelled breakbeats. From here on the ride takes wild turns. The album moves into a piano-led ballad about loneliness and online identity (‘In This Room’); then a saxophone quartet’s strange lament for a fallen planet (‘Red Star’); a comedic-occult industrial number about dead monarchs (‘Philip’); a road trip on which jazz-funk petrolheads confront the deafening silence of the cosmos (‘Interstate 5’); a bittersweet remembrance of friends lost in the lysergic mist of 1990s England (‘Broken Pets’); back in time to doomed fur-trappers on the snow-covered Dakotas (‘A Frozen Western’). It finishes with the absurd games of politicians, a song directly inspired by the lunatic rhetoric of a certain US administration’s lawyers (‘Non-Zero Number’).
You could say that the God in Hackney’s music has always offered an ultra-oblique, dreamlike form of social commentary. Their 2014 debut, Cave Moderne—named album of the year by the late, great, Andrew Weatherall—imagined contemporary society if it was still inhabited by Neanderthals. Its mordant-pop follow-up, Small Country Eclipse, was a record about islander mentality, about the empty nationalism of Brexit and populist politics. Now we have The World in Air Quotes, their most dynamic and genre-defying to date, a record which resists easy categorization, made in the innovative spirit of post-punk, in pursuit of vital and fresh sonic real-estate.
It is an album about life, death, ecology, and the sclerotic grip of a culture mired in quote, reference and deflated imagination; an ambitious attempt to climb out of the hole.
SINGLE RELEASES
“The World in Air Quotes” will be led with two single releases. The first of these, ‘Heaven & Black Water’, is released February 17 2023 on digital. On March 10 2023 it will be released on limited edition double AA 7-inch single b/w the second single from the album, ‘In This Room’. Pre-order the digital and 7-inch here: https://thegodinhackney.bandcamp.com/album/in-this-room-heaven-black-water
“All the things you thought you knew, arranged as objects on a table in front of you… All the facts you confused with your life, moving past you in conveyance for the last time.”
“Heaven & Black Water” imagines all the elements of someone’s life, laid out in front of them on a vast, celestial conveyor belt; the people and creatures they’ve loved and hurt, the things they’ve presumed to be true, but never really understood. A beautiful, epic threnody built from dubbed-out beats, lilting, auto-tuned melodies and industrial electronics; a group hug between Coil, Cocteau Twins and Portishead. The song is both dreamy and heavy, melodic and abstract; truly hard-to-place. The follow-up single, ‘In This Room’ is a simple ballad, with echoes of The Durutti Column, about digital loneliness; the group chats, social apps, digital spaces, places and sub-routines that colonize our lives.
A video for ‘Heaven & Black Water,’ directed by Los Angeles-based artist Olivia Mole, will be released with the single. For ‘In This Room,‘ God in Hackney band member and visual artist Nathaniel Mellors has made a tragicomic stop-motion animation, drawn from his most recent body of artwork shown at FRAC Bretagne, Matt’s Gallery London and MONITOR, Lisbon.