Incoming! | Phoenix

Heads Up! — New Music Incoming!

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Phoenix

About This Incoming! Artist

The four men of Phoenix are a close-knit group of childhood friends from Versailles, which Mars calls "one of the most beautiful cities in France, but a place without a soundtrack. People don't listen to music there."

To write their new album, 'Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix', the Gallic quartet decamped to various locales away from their home studio in Versailles, searching for the stimulus necessary to transform the new material into a coherent LP. "We spent a long time waiting for the chemical reaction," says guitarist Laurent Brancowitz, "that moment when a song isn't just the sum of all of our parts, but it's something more. And the idea was to go someplace we'd never been."

The results collected on 'Wolfgang' demonstrate a kind of deliberate, considered approach. Featuring the band's signature melding of synthetics and organics, of sharp, danceable rhythms and intense guitars, of effortless melody with a considerable dose of aural panache, the album's ten songs are more layered than previous efforts.

They say that playing shows is what's sustained them most over the years. As Brancowitz says, "What I love most about playing live is the feeling that you can fail," he says. "It's always a gamble as to how well it's going to come across. But what makes it good is that you have to fight for it. Our friendship is what keeps us together. We're a gang, and when we're all working together, it can be beautiful."