Beirut announce their first full-length album in four years, Hadsel

Zach Condon returns to announce his first new Beirut album in more than four years. Following the persistent throat issues that forced him to cancel the end of Beirut’s Gallipoli tour in 2019, and question whether he would ever be able to play a live show again, Zach Condon sought not only to recover, but to escape.

He manifested a dream of retreating to a small cabin where the sun rarely rises above the horizon, and in the first days of 2020, he arrived on the island of Hadsel, far up in the northern part of Norway in the middle of Vesterålen. There, Condon met a collector and fellow organ enthusiast named Oddvar, who gave him access to the local Hadselkirke. Dating back to the early 1800s, the wooden, octagonal structure housed the first church organ that Condon would play, and for two months he began to build the foundations of this album. Fully written, performed and recorded by Zach Condon, Hadsel brings Beirut back to its solitary yet self-assured roots

“During my time in Hadsel, I worked hard on the music, lost in a trance and stumbling blindly through my own mental collapse that I had been pushing aside since I was a teenager,” says Zach Condon. “I was left agonising many things past and present while the beauty of the nature, the northern lights and fearsome storms played an awesome show around me. The few hours of light would expose the unfathomable beauty of the mountains and the fjords, and the hours-long twilights would fill me with subdued excitement. I’d like to believe that scenery is somehow present in the music.”

Of “So Many Plans” Zach Condon adds: “I liked that this song struck a balance between the feelings of acceptance, hope and giving up. The lyric came from a covid-times lament that rolled effortlessly into a kind of short lullaby. The instruments were somewhat unusual for me at the time, having dusted off a baritone uke I never used before to join the album’s primary instruments of either pump or church organ and the modular synthesizer as percussion and bass.”

Between the formative recordings Zach Condon recently unearthed on 2022’s Artifacts compilation, the Balkan brass music that influenced Beirut’s debut Gulag Orkestar LP, the Italian town where 2019’s widely acclaimed Gallipoli.

Tracklist:

1. Hadsel
2. Arctic Forest
3. Baion
4. So Many Plans
5. Melbu
6. Stokmarknes
7. Island Life
8. Spillhaugen
9. January 18th
10. Süddeutsches Ton-Bild-Studio
11. The Tern
12. Regulatory