Oxbow have announced details of their first new album in 10 years, entitled Thin Black Duke. You can check out a brief trailer for the album above featuring a short snippet of music from the new record.
The album will be released via the Hydra Head label, and will be the first material released on that label since 2013. Thin Black Duke is their seventh studio album in a three-decade career.
"For this record I wanted to go even further in the way we always make recordings, as music that hangs together over an entire album, ‘large scale coherence’ if you will," says guitarist Niko Wenner. "I was inspired by pieces like Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the formal technique in classical music where a small idea, a kernel, is reiterated, morphed, expanded and truncated, to make a piece of music permeated with the potent perfume of that small element."
Speaking separately last year, the band’s Eugene Robinson suggested the new album had been 10 years in the making, saying: "We got Joe Chiccarelli who produced the last one [The Narcotic Story, Nuerot] to produced this one. He bumped us down the schedule. It’s taken close to ten years now because he was doing stuff with Jack White – so he bumped us. He did the Morrissey record – so he bumped us. He did Alanis Morissette – so he bumped us. And that was a bitter pill to swallow. I don’t mind being bumped for Jack White or Morrissey but Alanis Morissette? So he finished recording and mixing the record and then we did something that Oxbow has never done before, we auditioned five different mastering people and sent them all thirty second segments of all of the songs and then we had an incredible listening party where we listened to all of them blind and ranked them all."
He further revealed that they ultimately settled on two different mastering engineers for the album: one for the digital release and another for the vinyl release. "It’s the end of a song cycle for us and after Thin Black Duke we’re going to do something completely different," he said. "The record after Thin Black Duke is going to be completely different. If we weren’t so lazy we’d change the band title but we’re not going to do that.
Thin Black Duke is set for release on May 5 and the band will tour the UK in April, with appearances at London’s The Dome (April 25), Brudenell Social Club in Leeds (April 26) and Brighton’s Patterns (April 27) all lined up amongst other European tour dates.
