Austin post-hardcore favorites …And You Will Know Us by the Trail Of Dead have announced plans to follow up 2020’s X: The Godless Void And Other Stories with a new album — their first quadraphonic surround sound studio album. XI: Bleed Here Now is out July 15 and features guest spots from Spoon’s Britt Daniel (“Growing Divide”) and Amanda Palmer (“Millennium Actress”), and the Tosca String Quartet (opener “Our Epic Attempts”). Today, the band is sharing two album cuts: lead single “No Confidence” and “Salt In Your Eyes.”
Produced by the band’s own Conrad Keely and Jason Reece alongside Charles Godfrey (who also produced X: The Godless Void And Other Stories, this is Trail’s 11th studio album. It was mastered by Scott Sedillo and KamranV at Bernie Grundman Mastering and is QUARK encoded to play in both stereo and Regular Matrix quadraphonic sound.
For context, QUARK is a plug-in that allows for creating an album in quadraphonic sound. Discussing recording vocals for “Growing Divide” the band’s Conrad Keely said, “…We thought how cool it would be to have our friend Britt Daniel come in to sing one of the harmonies, so that we could have four different voices separated out between two stereo mixes.”
Keely adds of the album: “Art has a role to play in the upcoming decade(s): it needs to point humanity towards solutions. Our hope is that by expanding the ways we listen and hear; we expand our own inner (my parents would say spiritual) potential for the problem-solving to come.”
Keely also created the album art, which is inspired by Jeremiah Chiu’s design for Suzanne Ciani’s 2018 LIVE Quadraphonic LP, the first quadraphonic vinyl release in more than 30 years.
Listen to “No Confidence” and “Salt In Your Eyes” below.
XI: Bleed Here Now is out 7/15 via Dine Alone Records. Pre-order here.