Artist News Release Round-Up Releases

Release Round-Up: Slayer, Neil Young, Tiësto, Mushroomhead and Cloud Boat

By Aly Barchi | Published on Monday 28 April 2014

Rounding up the latest release news…

Slayer are back slaying again, by which I mean they’re releasing an LP later this year, and have shared a new track titled ‘Implode’ as evidence. Their first since 2009’s ‘World Painted Blood’, the still unlabelled album is to come out via a new imprint set up just for the band by metal indie Nuclear Blast. Which means this record signals an end to Slayer’s stint on Rick Rubin’s American Recordings.

Speaking on that fact, vocalist/bassist Tom Araya says: “Rick has played a huge role in our career, we’ve made some great albums with him. But today is a new day, record companies don’t play the kind of role they once did, and we really like the idea of going out on our own, connecting directly with our fans, and Nuclear Blast is fired up about taking on that challenge with us”. Download ‘Implode’ (by signing to the Slayer mailing list) via this link, and/or play it now:

Taking time off from playing some kind of iGod with his Pono contraption, Neil Young has given the ‘okay’ on a CD/digital release of his covers compilation ‘A Letter Home’. Originally released on limited vinyl only this past Record Store Day via Jack White’s Third Man label, the LP consists of eleven tracks, of songs originally done by the likes of Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Don Everly and Bruce Springsteen, and an intro.

It was taped live inside a vintage 1957 Voice-O-Graph booth, like the one in ‘Brighton Rock’, at Third Man’s Nashville HQ. Young bills it as “an unheard collection of rediscovered songs from the past recorded on ancient electro-mechanical technology captures and unleashes the essence of something that could have been gone forever”. ‘A Letter Home’ will be available in normal formats, and as a hand-made boxset with lots of cool extras, on 26 May. In the mean time this is Neil squashed in the booth singing Bert Jansch’s ‘Needle Of Death’:

Get this: party-time EDM DJ Tiësto is releasing a Las Vegas-inspired new LP, titled ‘A Town Called Paradise’, on 16 Jun. Predictably, it features a shitload of vocalists, not least Ladyhawke, Icona Pop, Cruickshank and Krewella. It’s his first official, original release of this kind (ie not one of his trio of 2011-2013 ‘Club Life’ remix sets) in five years, by the way.

Explaining ‘that’ title, Tiësto explains: “When I really look at it, it’s like this oasis of entertainment right in the middle of the desert, so to me, ‘A Town Called Paradise’ is a good way to describe Las Vegas. It’s been a very special place to me and has influenced the creation of this album”.

Yeah, Vegas is heaven. A real special, sexualised, entirely fake kind of heaven. Anyway, take a gamble on the ‘Paradise’ tracklisting here, and Tiësto’s Matthew Koma-featuring new single ‘Wasted’ (tagline: “I like it better when we’re wasted”) here:

Metal’s #1 fun guys Mushroomhead, from Ohio, have chucked a song online to make known that they’re releasing a new album ‘The Righteous & the Butterfly’, right in the middle of May.

Pray hear its lead single ‘QWERTY’, which in fact dates back to the early days of Shroom, after you’d read what the band’s bassist Dr F had to say to Loudwire on it: “‘QWERTY’ is one of those songs that is a anything goes, wide spectrum-style tune. From its inception, it was obvious that this would be a fun, creepy, unpredictable one. We wanted to fuse together the fun, dark keyboard driven sounds of the old school with a raw, heavy modern twist. We feel as though we’ve accomplished this and couldn’t be more excited that it became the first single!”

Yay! Now shut up and listen:

And finally, deep-sea pop divers Cloud Boat (pictured) have confirmed the details of their latest LP ‘Model Of You’, the follow-on to last year’s ‘Book Of Hours’. It’s released via R&S, Apollo on 7 Jul, and will feature a track titled ‘Carmine’ as its lead single. Watch lots of characters with sad-eyes loitering in a launderette, so basically a standard launderette situation, in the ‘Carmine’ video, here: