Wilco Announce New Album Schmilco; Stream “If I Ever Was a Child”

Wilco Announce New Album Schmilco; Stream “If I Ever Was a Child”

Last week, Wilco released a new track called “Locator” — ostensibly to recognize the one-year anniversary of the band’s last LP, the surprise release Star Wars. It appears as though the band have more surprises in store, though — namely a soon-to-be-released album called Schmilco (a Schmilsson nod?) on which “Locator” appears alongside 11 other new songs.

Working off a tip from Twitter user O Errático, we ran “Locator” through a content-ID service and came up with this:

wilco-schmilco-tracklist

That looks pretty legit — even more so when you consider that numerous sites are reporting a second single, “If I Ever Was A Child,” is due tomorrow on Anti-/Epitaph (presumably meaning the band’s own dBpm Records via Anti-/Epitaph). You can hear two minutes of the track’s gentle twang right now at DJTunes, where the track listing is accompanied by a Joan Cornellà-created Schmilco album cover (seen in the image atop this post). It’s in Shazam too.

“If I Ever Was A Child” was performed as part of a Jeff Tweedy solo set on 5/13 of this year at Vic Theatre in Chicago. Tweedy played another Schmilco track, “Normal American Kids,” on 1/14 at at Todos Santos Music Festival.

Back in February, Tweedy promised “Wilco have another one ready to go this year,” and based on the evidence, it seems like that one is set to arrive any day now…

Schmilco Tracklist
01 “Normal American Kids”
02 “If I Ever Was A Child”
03 “Cry All Day”
04 “Common Sense”
05 “Nope”
06 “Someone To Lose”
07 “Happiness”
08 “Quarters”
09 “Locator”
10 “Shrug And Destroy”
11 “We Aren’t The World (Safety Girl)”
12 “Just Say Goodbye”

UPDATE: Wilco are seemingly teasing the album on Twitter…

UPDATE 2: It’s official. Schmilco is out 9/9 via dBpm (with a special early vinyl release 9/6) and available for pre-order in various bundles here. Recorded in Chicago, the LP was produced by Jeff Tweedy and Tom Schick and a press release promises it will be mostly acoustic and “intentionally loose”:

Schmilco finds band leader Tweedy in a state of alienation: how to cope with dissonance between self-identity and the public perception of his band – to maintain an innocence and earnestness even as some have come to see him as more (or less) than human, and Wilco as something other than six musicians?

“I think this record is ‘joyously negative’,” Tweedy said. “It’s sad in a lot of ways but not in any that reach a conclusion of doom or hopelessness… I just had a lot of fun being sour about the things that upset me.”

Stream “If I Ever Was A Child” below.

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