Leeds-based alternative rock trailblazers I LIKE TRAINS have announced the release of their fourth studio album 'KOMPROMAT' (translates from Russian as 'compromising material').
This is the band’s first record since 2012’s ‘The Shallows’, which focused on how the internet and smart technology is re-wiring the human mind and affecting our concentration spans. Now, with ‘KOMPROMAT’, it’s clear that this same technology, in the wrong hands, has taken an even more sinister turn. The game has changed – and I LIKE TRAINS have changed with it.
The album will be out via Schubert Music’s newly founded Atlantic Curve label on August 21. Pre-order your copy here.
This is a record that digs beneath populism’s rise, from the divide and conquer tactics that caused Brexit in the UK, to Trump’s ascent in America and the subsequent reign of lies and misinformation, to discover the grubby hands that have engineered it all.
The band have also shared the lead single "The Truth", written as an instinctive gut reaction to a world that has changed beyond all recognition, this razor-sharp track is accompanyied by a just-as-impactful deep-fake karaoke video. 8 years and one documentary film since their previous album, it's time for this eye-opening soundtrack to a world that has changed beyond all recognition.
‘The Truth’ was the last track to come together during the group’s recording sessions – a summation of the way in which facts are bent and, in many cases, utterly dismantled. Over a burring build of disco-inflected post-punk that recalls LCD Soundsystem and early DFA Records, “The truth is no longer concerned with the facts”.
“I’d been writing this list on my phone for a couple of months, adding a couple of lines
to it every so often. I’d read a news article or a tweet and I’d make reference to it. I decided to dig out this list in the last couple of days in the studio [for this track]. It’s pretty much the order I wrote it in – it came together on the fifth take and it was a pretty cathartic process,” says the group’s vocalist and lyricist David Martin.
“We didn’t set out to write a record about current affairs, but the path we set out on converged drastically with that daily discourse. The album inadvertently became about populist politics across the world. Brexit, Trump, Cambridge Analytics and covert Russian influence ended up at the centre of it all”.
At the time, Martin started writing about low-key, insidious intrusions on our privacy. As global events unfolded, however, so did the importance of those themes: the perception of what is true and what isn’t true being challenged on a daily basis and how that confusion could be used to manipulate populations into thinking and voting in certain ways.
Check out the album's tracklist and watch the video for "The Truth" , below.
KOMPROMAT Tracklist:
01. A Steady Hand
02. Desire Is A Mess
03. Dig In
04. PRISM
05. Patience Is A Virtue
06. A Man Of Conviction
07. New Geography
08. The Truth
09. Eyes To The Left (feat. Anika)
(facebook.com/iLiKETRAiNSmusic)
Tags: I LIKE TRAINS
