Ra Ra Riot Announces New Album Need Your Light To Be Released February 19 On Barsuk Records
An exciting announcement has just come out from Syracuse, New York’s Indie rock band, Ra Ra Riot. Their new album, Need Your Light, is set to be released on February 19 of next year via Barsuk Records, cover art seen above. In order to celebrate their announcement, Ra Ra Riot has shared the album’s first single, “Water,” with fans earlier today. The song’s lyric video can be seen below.
“Water” was done in collaboration with Vampire Weekend’s Rostam and helps to flaunt Ra Ra Riot’s “heightened levels of experimentation found throughout the forthcoming Need Your Light,” according to the bands press release. The video displays the lyrics in bold white over a time lapsed sky that seems to be a upward view during a stroll through the city with the shot briefly changing to a shot of the open ocean. The song promotes a sense of freedom as Wes Miles repeats the chorus, “I took off all these tight clothes, Jumped into the water” and pleads with the listener “don’t punish me, for what I feel.” Pairing with the open sky as a sort of daydream state of mind the lyric video helps to promote the song’s sense of entrapment and a need for an escape from what seem to the be the confines of everyday life or your “tight clothes” into the freedom of the song’s title “water.”
Need your Light was produced by Ryan Hadlock, who is known for his work with Vance Joy and Blonde Redhead. The before mentioned Rostam Batmanglij, known for his work with Vampire Weekend, Charli XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen, worked only on two of the ablum’s tracks; “I Need Your Light” and “Water.” Rostom has this to say about how his contribution came to be and the experience he had with his work on the album.
Rostam states, “Between 2005-2009, Wes and I wrote an album together in snatched moments in our lives… That record (the Discovery LP) seemed to benefit from us having the freedom to pick it up and put it down. In January of this year, Wes came to stay with me, and we set out to write songs again. We didn’t know where it would take us. There was something I’d heard in Wes’s singing in the earliest days of seeing Ra Ra Riot live that I felt had never quite been captured on record. There was our shared love of U2’s Achtung Baby, something that having listened to the music we’ve recorded in our lives thus far you might not know about. And also this obsession with writing songs that tell stories. So we spent five days writing just two songs – ‘Water’ and ‘I Need Your Light’- and I think we found that same freedom in making these songs that we had found years ago making the Discovery record, not knowing where it would take us.”
The new album was made with one very important band characteristic in mind and that was their root as a house party band. This influence came after the band concluded a short tour late last year of various warehouses and basements. Immediately after this tour is when the band got into the studio and started recording the album.
Bassist Mathieu Santos had this to say about why the band decided this, “Because we started as a house party band, we never wanted to lose sight of having fun and engaging with the audience through visceral live shows,” Santos says. With Need Your Light, Ra Ra Riot are incorporating their past into the future. The tracklist for Need Your Light can be found below.
Ra Ra Riot Need Your Light Tracklisting:
01. Water
02. Absolutely
03. Foreign Lovers
04. I Need Your Light
05. Bad Times
06. Call Me Out
07. Instant Breakup
08. Every Time I’m Ready To Hug
09. Bouncy Castle
10. Suckers
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