A little less than a quarter of the way through Jestures, Atmosphere’s sprawling and acrobatic new album, Slug cuts right to the beating heart of this phase in the legendary duo’s catalog: “Still get nightmares when you’re living your dreams,” he raps. The cliches about creativity say that it comes from chaos and the rock star archetypes forged in the 1970s conjure images of coke spoons and trashed hotel rooms, and more recent thinking makes it inextricable from major trauma.

 Jestures, which is already Atmosphere’s fifth release of the 2020s, challenges that notion. This remarkably productive period has seen Slug burrow into every crevice of middle-aged stability and domestic life for its unexpected points of friction. With Jestures, this exploration has yielded its most fascinating results to date.

Alongside the album announcement, the band has shared the singles, “Velour” & “Really,” which comes paired with a music video directed by Melby. In the video, Slug pulls back the curtain on a series of daredevil stunts, landing somewhere between John Wick, The Rehearsal and Jackass.

Jestures Tracklist

1. Asshole
2. Baby
3. Caddy
4. Daley
5. Effortless (feat. Evidence)
6. Furthermore
7. Grateful
8. Heavy Lifting (feat. Haphduzn)
9. Instrument
10. Jester
11. Kilowatts (feat. Kurious)
12. Locusts
13. Mash (feat. Mike the Martyr, Musab, Muja Messiah)
14. Neptune
15. Ophidiophobia
16. Past
17. Quicksand
18. Really
19. Sean
20. Trying
21. Used To
22. Velour
23. Westbound
24. XXX
25. Yearning (feat. Yoni Wolf (of WHY?))
26. Zorro (feat. ZooDeVille)

Photo Credit: Vivianne Navarrete