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Artist News Releases
Gold Panda announces new album The Work
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 8 September 2022
Gold Panda has announced that he will release his new album, ‘The Work’, later this year, with new single ‘The Corner’ out now.
It samples the Dean Friedman track ‘Lydia’ which, the producer says, was given to him by a friend a few years ago. On originally hearing the track – and especially the sampled lyric “I’m down here on the corner” – he says: “I had to loop it up and mess with it. I tried to make it into a beat for some rappers but I could never get it right”.
“When making this album I found the sample again”, he explains, “I had a new way of recording so starting from scratch it all came together”.
And now that he’s finally made a track with the Friedman sample, maybe some rappers will be inspired to use it. “When I made [2010 album] ‘Lucky Shiner’ people used to rap over those tracks and stick them on SoundCloud etc”, he notes, “so I’m hoping this will inspire people to do it again”.
Speaking about the album’s title, he says that “’the work’ is something that’s used in my therapy a lot, and I hear it a lot in self-care and books about mental health – the work on yourself basically. Which I’ve done with therapy, running, pilates and an osteopath”.
“The last few years”, he adds, have been about “self-care and trying to put the work in on myself to see where I’m going wrong and why I might be depressed. When my first daughter was born I found that transition really hard from not being the only person to look after – just taking caring of myself, not having time to do anything and managing my time, so I had to work on that too: there are loads of things ‘the work’ can be about”.
“I never thought I’d be happy in my 40s”, he goes on. “But I think also becoming 40 helped me be able to realise the things I like doing and am comfortable doing, not doing what other people might expect me to do. I think a lot of the tunes don’t go where you expect. There’s a lot of changes and a lot of stuff going on”.
”I get more comfortable with the music I make as Gold Panda now”, he concludes. “I always wanted to do the ‘cool’ music, but I can only make the music I make, I suppose. I think that’s why I find making club music hard – I don’t spend enough time in them. I don’t know where I fit in, and maybe that’s good”.
Listen to ‘The Corner’ here:
