Get a bloody move on 2015 still has a surprise release up its sleeve
Albums from Rihanna, Chromatics & more could define the next month.
Two days into December, and albums of the year lists are pouring in like a dam has broken, giving way to 2015’s musical wisdom. That’s that, school’s out. 336 of the year’s 365 days have passed. With Adele selling squillions and putting the rest of the year to shame, surely nothing could emerge in December to out-shock and out-buzz everything that’s already emerged in 2015.
This is fool’s logic. At around 5am UK time on 13th December 2013, Beyoncé decided to drop the year’s biggest album, just like that. One week later it was released on CD, topping charts everywhere. Releasing a massive album ridiculously late in the year tends to work, as it happens.
A similar story played out last year. D’Angelo picked 14th December to return with ‘Black Messiah’. Critics fawned in unison, and it actually ended up charting fairly well (#5 on the Billboard Chart) for a record that came out when everyone had given up, climbing under a slanket, waiting for The Internet to come to a slow, shivering halt.
If there’s anything the last two years have taught us, it’s that music never sleeps. As East India Youth once famously and regrettably claimed at a glitzy Mercury Prize ceremony, “music is the real winner”. Concepts of time, the traditional Gregorian calendar and bigwig labels’ release schedules can do nothing to halt the power of a satisfying surprise release, plonked right at the end of the year.
No doubt about it - 2015 is hiding something. Some secrets aren’t really secrets at all, like the fact that Rihanna’s going to have to put out ‘ANTI’ before her gigantic world tour starts, at the very least. Others are more under wraps than Burial’s current hobbies (come to think of it, Burial made an alternative Christmas soundtrack in 2013 when he put out ‘Rival Dealer’ in December. Has anyone checked what he’s up to?).
To save you fretting about what’s around the corner, here’s a rundown of the surprise releases that could but probably won’t happen.
Rihanna - ANTI
Less a surprise, more something that has to bloody happen at some point.
It was all looking promising for ‘R8’. Her stupidly long-awaited album had a cover. It was a good cover, too, with braille inscriptions and a snazzy design. Best of all, it had the square shape of a traditional album cover. It was real. It was truly happening. ‘ANTI’ could not be fiction.
Since then, it began to look increasingly likely that Rihanna’s new album would be released over the Thanksgiving weekend via a Samsung phone and TIDAL - music’s true lynchpins of generosity and inclusiveness. This hasn’t played out as swiftly as RiRi fans might have hoped.
Instead, there’s this app, right? You get your great big Samsung phone and wave it around lots, in the hope that somehow, maybe, you might hear some new music. ‘ANTIdiaRy’ is its name. It consists of rooms. Eight rooms (because ‘R8’), all linking in some way to Rihanna’s life, all furthering the notion that this album is an impossible dream and it’ll never come.
There’s still a fair chance that ‘ANTI’ will be coming out on 4th December, but the app’s going to need to get a move on. So far, we’ve seen three rooms. R1 is her childhood bedroom, R2 is her studio, R3 is impending doom. If this album is landing in two days, Rihanna’s going to need to open doors like her life depends on it, like there’s a flight to catch in 30 minutes and she can’t find her passport.
We’ve reached the stage where ‘ANTI’ is no longer a surprise, or even a suspenseful build. It’s the equivalent of an UFO your mate Brad from California claims to have seen once on his travels.
Chromatics - Dear Tommy
Johnny Jewel has spent the vast part of 2015 teasing. The cinematic obsessive and the man responsible for ‘Drive’ soundtrack-era nightwave has been very quiet since 2012’s magnum opus ‘Kill For Love’. It sounds like he’s treating the follow-up, ‘Dear Tommy’, with the same ambition.
Back in February, Chromatics shared ‘Just Like You’, which promised to be the first in a wave of new singles. We’d have a new song to listen to every week, they fibbed.
Instead, they’ve given the slow game. They recently soundtracked an advert starring Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne with a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’, and they delivered one of the year’s standout tracks with ‘In Films’. Jewel busies himself as the brains behind Italians Do It Better, and there’s a strong chance that ‘Dear Tommy’’s delay is simply because the timing hasn’t been right. A lull in the year and the freezing cold could be the perfect companion for ‘Dear Tommy’’s icy glow.
Fleet Foxes - TBA
This one’s a lot more ‘write about it and hope something actually happens’ than anything else. Fleet Foxes are officially on hiatus. They might never come back, depending on if mastermind Robin Pecknold writes the right songs. “I decided to go back to school,” he told fans back in April. “I never got an undergraduate degree, and this felt like the right time to both see what that was about and to try something new after a while in the touring / recording lifestyle. I moved to New York and enrolled at Columbia, and I’ve mostly been doing that, but I’m working on songs and excited for whatever happens next musically, even if it’s down the line.”
Fair enough. Robin needs a break. Penning four-piece harmonies and touring the world can take its toll. But hopefully since April, in between finding out more about how the world works, Pecknold has had a reality check, the nagging realisation that he’s bloody good at music and he should get a move on with making more, instead of doing equally valid things like scoring plays.
Nothing but mere hopeless speculation backed up the idea that Fleet Foxes might be coming back. That was until last week, when Pecknold returned with a solo cover of Five Keys’ ‘Ought of Sight, Out of Mind’. A slight nod to bowing out of the spotlight or just a fun ditty to post while Americans tucked into turkey?
Alongside the track, Fleet Foxes updated their Facebook cover photo this week - music’s surest sign that a band is up to something. It was swapped to a photo of Philip Guston’s 1970 painting ‘Bad Habits’. Speaking of bad habits, isn’t it rubbish when a band disappears and forgets to tell everyone what they’re up to every single day?
Frank Ocean - Boys Don’t Cry
Let’s pretend it’s still July. The month where Frank Ocean’s going to release his new album. The clock’s ticking, Frank. But not to worry, you did say that you’d specifically release ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ in July, alongside a fancy magazine that’s honestly just a sidenote for the most feverishly awaited new album in yonks. July. What a wonderful month. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
A lot of time has passed. Everyone is waiting. Even Adele. Adele, who has obviously been very busy. Between building up to releasing the year’s biggest release and belting her heart out, she’s wasted hours wondering what happened to July.
It’s been a shitshow. There was that time Frank was meant to appear at James Blake’s 1-800 Dinosaur nights. There are the tweets from his ex-girlfriend that continuously claim she’s listening to his new record. Most recently, a creative director working with Frank appeared to Snapchat the ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ record he was once perched next to. Fucking hell, this is tenuous.
July is not December. July is nowhere near December. But there’s a chance - a really pathetic, slim chance - that this album could land before the year’s out.
Featuring SOFT PLAY, Corinne Bailey Rae, 86TVs, English Teacher and more!