Hear Spoon Preview New Album They Want My Soul, Watch Them Play “Rainy Taxi” In London

Hear Spoon Preview New Album They Want My Soul, Watch Them Play “Rainy Taxi” In London

UPDATE: Spoon will perform at least one song from They Want My Soul in a live NPR webcast from NYC’s Le Poisson Rouge on Monday 6/9 at 1:30PM EST.

When Spoon announced that they had something mysterious called “R.I.P.” coming next week, we didn’t know what it meant; it seemed entirely possible that they could pull a Beyoncé on us and just drop a new album out of the blue. Well, we still don’t know what “R.I.P.” is, but we do have a pretty good idea that it’s not a new album. The band has announced a few of the details of their next album, the follow-up to 2010’s Transference.

That new album is called They Want My Soul, and it’ll be out 8/5 on new label Loma Vista. It’s the first album that the band recorded with their newest member, keyboardist Alex Fischel, who previously played with Britt Daniel in the Divine Fits. It’s also the first they’ve ever made with outside producers; they started out with longtime industry pro Joe Chiccarelli and finished up with the much-celebrated Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev collaborator Dave Fridmann in Fridmann’s upstate New York studio. Given that Spoon’s entire aesthetic is minimal and carefully composed, while Fridmann is more famous for messy splashes of sound, it’ll be interesting to hear how their styles mesh.

The band recently sat for an interview with NPR’s All Things Considered, where they said a few things about the album. For one thing, there’s a cover: A version of “I Just Don’t Understand,” a 1961 song made famous by Ann-Margaret and also covered by the Beatles. Britt Daniel initially recorded the cover for the web magazine Rookie, but he decided to keep it for his own band’s album. There’s also another one called “Knock Knock Knock” and one called “New York Kiss” and Jonathan Fisk, a character who was the subject of a song on Spoon’s classic 2002 album Kill The Moonlight, makes another appearance. The interview includes a few clips of new songs, which sound great, and you can hear it here. We also posted video of the band debuting “Rainy Taxi” onstage this past weekend. Watch them play it for a second time in London on Tuesday night…

And here’s a video teaser for Tuesday’s reveal.

more from News