Today, Algiers release new single ‘I Can’t Stand It!’, taken from their forthcoming new album SHOOK, released February 24th on Matador. The song features Samuel T. Herring (Future Islands) and Jae Matthews (Boy Harsher). It samples fellow Atlanta artist Lee Moses’ 1971 song, ‘What You Don’t Want Me To Be’.
‘I Can’t Stand It!’ was written and produced by frontman Franklin James Fisher, who says: “It’s a very personal song about a devastating loss of someone I believed to be the love of my life which nearly ended in my suicide. I think the song’s narrative arc reflects the sense of dread and the path that led me to that moment. She put on ‘What You Don’t Want Me To Be’ the first time I heard it and I knew immediately that I was going to sample it — I just couldn’t have known the result would be a song about our own end. But every time I sing that song now it feels like I heal a little bit more.”
Jae Matthews says: “I wanted to give Algiers not so much a narrative, but a recollection of a feeling. That abstract evocation that comes when you think about someone who broke yr heart and how that pain still tethers you.”
‘I Can’t Stand It!’ follows the singles ‘Bite Back’ featuring billy woods and Backxwash and ‘Irreversible Damage’ featuring Zack de la Rocha. The Observer called ‘Bite Back’, “… an urgent, unsettling invective against police brutality and psyops“. Afropunk highlighted ‘Irreversible Damage’ as, “… a track that shines a light on everything Algiers does best. It’s intense, but contemplative, haunting but driving. Jagged edged guitars and liquid 303s underpin Fisher and De La Rocha’s tumultuous vocals which spit out lines that split the difference between poetry and prophecy.”
Algiers kicked off the first show of the SHOOK era with a guest strewn performance at New York’s National Sawdust on December 15th which featured SHOOK collaborators Big Rube, billy woods, Deforrest Brown Jr, LaToya Kent, Mark Cisneros, Patrick Shiroishi alongside many others.
“The world got shook”
So Algiers formed a crew. The band — who have built one of the most exciting catalogs and cult followings of recent years, with 2020’s There Is No Year described as “electrifying and unpredictable” (The Observer) and “precise, thoughtful and powerful” (NME) — gathered a posse of like-minded artists to create their fourth album, SHOOK, out February 24th on Matador. Stacked with guests spanning icons through to future stars, SHOOK is a lightning rod for an elusive yet universal energy and feeling. A plurality of voices; a spiritual and geographical homecoming; a strategy of communion in a burning world; the story of an end of a relationship; an Atlanta front porch summer party. Ultimately, it’s a 17-track set of the most mind-expanding and thrilling music that you are likely to hear anytime soon.
Algiers have always been unflinching, but SHOOK is at the same time notably joyous and celebratory. It was born when Fisher and Mahan found themselves back in their native Atlanta for several months, reeling from growing pressures and burnout as touring musicians. This triggered an intense period of beat making, reconnecting as friends over hours immersed in episodes of Rhythm Roulette and Against the Clock and descending deep into alt-rap YouTube rabbit holes. A revisit of DJ Grand Wizard Theodore’s 1970s punk-infused New York City rap masterpiece ‘Subway Theme’ served as a spiritual mood board for the album’s cross-pollination of urban and counter-culture styles. Across the seamlessly flowing set, including spoken vignettes and ambient instrumental segues, the band pay respect to a sprawling lineage of rap and punk iconoclasts from DJ Premier, DJ Screw and Dead Boys to Lukah, Griselda and Dï
While community and collaboration has always been integral to Algiers’ ethos, SHOOK
Atlanta, where the genesis of this record took place, is ultimately at its heart. It opens with a robotic train announcement from Hartsfield Airport — iconic to many Atlanta natives — that used to frighten Fisher when he was a child. Field recordings and original samples created by the band emphasise throughout a sense of place, collectivity, imagined community and home, all building a world that evokes the elusive sensory experience of growing up in the urban South. “We were working in an environment that we were used to”, says guitarist Lee Tesche. “It feels like the most Algiers record that we’ve ever made.”
The accomplishment of this record is made all the more impressive by the fact it was made by a band who were falling apart and on the verge of breaking up. But instead they have produced an extraordinary, transformative record born from a shared sense of place and experience. “I think this record is us finding home,” says Mahan, with Fisher adding: “It was a whole new positive experience — having a renewed relationship with the city we’re from and having a pride in that. I like the idea that this record has taken you on a voyage but it begins and ends in Atlanta.”
Pre-order / Pre-save SHOOK: https://algiers.ffm.to/
1. Everybody Shatter (ft. Big Rube)
2. Irreversible Damage
3. 73%
4. Cleanse Your Guilt Here
5. As It Resounds (ft. Big Rube)
6. Bite Back (ft. billy woods & Backxwash)
7. Out of Style Tragedy (ft. Mark Cisneros)
8. Comment #2
9. A Good Man
10. I Can’t Stand It! (ft. Samuel T. Herring & Jae Matthews)
11. All You See Is
12. Green Iris
13. Born (ft. LaToya Kent)
14. Cold World (ft. Nadah El Shazly)
15. Something Wrong
16. An Echophonic Soul (ft. DeForrest Brown Jr. & Patrick Shiroishi)
17. Momentary (ft. Lee Bains III)
