Hear a Sample of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Upcoming Epic

Members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Photo: courtesy of Windish Agency

Crescendo architects Godspeed You! Black Emperor will return with a new album, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, next month. The record, which “clocks in at a succinct 40:23,” according to the band’s label, contains four new, sure-to-be overwhelming compositions that the band recorded in 2013 and 2014 in North Carolina and Montreal.

The label reports that the album’s two middle songs, “Lambs’ Breath” and “Asunder, Sweet,” are drone works, while the final tune, the 14-minute “Piss Crowns are Trebled,” contains a series of the band’s signature crescendos. To accompany the album announcement, the band offered an eight-minute snippet of lead track “Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!'” Beginning with brassy, neo-classical guitar trumpeting and atonal violin screeches, the sample congeals into a folky, art-rock fusion of guitar fuzz, reedy-sounding strings and vaguely Middle Eastern melodies before fading out.

The album is the collective’s first single-LP record since the late Nineties. It will be available on March 31st on CD and LP; the latter format comes on 180-gram vinyl and includes a download code for high-quality MP3s of the album and a “pull-out art poster.”

Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress is the group’s first offering since 2012’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!. That release was, at the time, the band’s first new album in a decade. The following year, the ensemble won Canada’s Polaris Prize for the album, but did not attend the ceremony. It said it would donate the prize money, $30,000, to support musical education in Quebec prisons.

Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress Track List:

1. “Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!'”
2. “Lambs’ Breath”
3. “Asunder, Sweet”
4. “Piss Crowns Are Trebled”