This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News Business News Education & Events Labels & Publishers
National Album Day announces 2022 ambassadors
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 16 August 2022
National Album Day is coming back for a fifth year! This year the theme is debut albums. We already knew that. But now we have some ambassadors!
For the uninitiated, National Album Day is the one and only day of the year where everyone in the UK listens to nothing but full LPs for 24 hours solid. Throughout the day, they post on social media, call friends, stage symposiums, launch podcasts, and write letters to long lost relatives about all the things they have discovered along the way. It’s like Christmas but better.
It’ll all take place on 15 Oct, and this year the ambassadors for the event who will help to guide you through the strange and confusing world of albums are: Franz Ferdinand, KSI, The Mysterines, Sam Ryder and The Staves. And by 15 Oct you will be able to listen to debut albums from all of them – Ryder’s being released the day before.
“What a glorious medium the album is”, says Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos, getting right into the spirit of the event. “On the most basic level it’s a bunch of songs that sound good together, but what I love is that it is a moment in time for the artist and the listener, a way to define a period of a lifetime. It’s the long form: a novel rather than a short story, a film rather than a trailer”.
“Sure, you can get a panel of writers to construct a song to meet the criteria of the algorithm, and that’s a distinct skill”, he continues, “but it will never have the complexity or richness and deep reward of a good album”.
KSI adds: “With an album, it’s essentially you living in the mind of an artist. What they’re thinking, what they’re feeling and how it makes me feel listening to it. Do I relate? Do I agree or disagree, what emotions do I feel? Even the instrumental can make you feel a certain way”.
“Albums at different stages in our lives can be so pivotal and help inspire different ways of thinking or feeling, and why I feel it is so important in our lives”, he goes on. “Listening to certain albums is like looking back at history of how I was feeling in the moment in time. And the nostalgia is truly amazing”.
Mysterines vocalist Lia Metcalfe comments: “I’m so pleased to be an ambassador for National Album Day. We released our debut album ‘Reeling’ earlier this year and it has been one of the most seminal moments in our lives. The album will remain a part of us forever, not just because it marks our first full creation as a band, but it’s years worth of stories, experiences and emotions weaved through the songs”.
“There is nothing better than listening to an album in its entirety, from start to finish, in the way the artist intended it to be heard”, she muses on. “I feel like we’ve lost that a lot nowadays, and to be part of National Album Day as an avid record listener and collector is something that is so integral to who I am”.
Says Sam Ryder: “I’m stoked to be a part of this year’s National Album Day! There are so many amazing albums from artists that have been a massive part of my life bringing so much joy. By listening to an album, you really get to know an artist. I’m so excited to be finally releasing my debut album this year and can’t wait for you all to hear it!”
And finally, The Staves blurt: “We are honoured and excited to support National Album Day. The album format is so important and has shaped the way we listen to and make music. Growing up listening to Beatles albums we would know them so well that we’d know not only which track was coming next, but exactly how many seconds it would be until it began, and what key it would be in”.
“Our debut album, ‘Dead & Born & Grown’ captured what we were doing live – playing our songs with an acoustic guitar, a ukulele and three-part harmonies – and it marked the beginning of our journey as recording artists in earnest”, they then state. “The album took us around the world to new audiences and into the arms of talented and inspiring musicians and collaborators and we are forever grateful that it connected with people”.
Still not finished, they continue: “Albums create a world for you to inhabit as a listener, where songs are set in the context of a wider body of work, allowing for music and magic of all shades to happen until the needle leaves the record. But albums stay with you, and you can revisit that world whenever you need to get back into it. Indeed, they shape your world, too, and become part of your life as it goes on. Long live the album!”
So, I think now we all understand what makes albums so great. Don’t go getting all excited and listening to any now though! You really must wait until 15 Oct when everyone else is doing it.
