Avant-rock experimentalist outfit Xiu Xiu are releasing Nina, a cover album of Nina Simone songs, next month. But there’s no stopping them and the brainchild project of Jamie Stewart have already announced the release of a new album of originals in early 2014. Entitled Angel Guts: Red Classroom, Xiu Xiu’s upcoming album arrives on February 3rd in Europe via Bella Union and the following day in North America via Polyvinyl.
Named after a Japanese erotic noir film, the album is described as “the beginning of Xiu Xiu’s descent from grayness into the deepest blackness endurable. It is the sound of Xiu Xiu’s death.” Heavily marked by Stewart’s life in a dangerous Los Angeles neighbourhood where he’d moved to, “the aura of his new home bleeds into every pore of the album, each lyric and note bearing traces of its essence: the terrible beauty, the despair, the violence, the ultra humanity, the uncertainty”.
‘Stupid in the Dark’ serves as the first taste from Angel Guts: Red Classroom. Listen to it now.