Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon has announced the release of Michelangelo Dying, her seventh album and follow-up to 2022’s Pompeii. Written in the thick of heartbreak, what began as one thing became another. “Its creation led by pure emotion,” says the press release. “The product of all-consuming heartache… it became a kind of exorcism.” Michelangelo Dying moves in cycles, without conclusion. “There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos,” Le Bon explains. “I eventually allowed myself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching for a revelation or order to any of it..”

The album was recorded between Hydra, Cardiff, London, Los Angeles, and the California desert, with Samur Khouja sharing production duties. Le Bon credits him with helping her get lost in the process while staying anchored. She comments:

“There’s this idea that you could do everything yourself, but the value of having someone you completely trust, as I do Samur, be your co-pilot allows you to get completely lost knowing you’ll get pulled back in at the right moment. We have come to quietly move as one in the studio.”

We’ll have to wait until September 26th for the album to be out through Mexican Summer but we can already hear the first single, ‘Heaven Is No Feeling’,  offered alongside an accompanying video directed by longtime collaborator H. Hawkline. He had this to say about it:

“There are moments in life you can’t make up, that seem unfathomable, then they happen. Life calls you on a banana phone and tells you her oldest joke, everybody crowds around and you try to remember the words to your favourite song. If you were to ask me how we made this video, I couldn’t tell you. Cate watching her, watching her watching Cate. I will always feel honoured to work with Cate in whatever shape or form, it’s easy to forget how remarkable someone is when you’ve known them forever. ‘I want you to make me a new video.’ ‘Have you watched the old one yet?’ ‘No’ …Bravo!’”

Watch the video below.

There´s a new album on the way from Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon entitled Reward. With DRINKS, her duo with Tim Presley, she released Hippo Lite last year but she hasn’t released a full-length since 2016’s Crab Day. Slated for a May 24th release through Mexican Summer, Reward came into being after Le Bon spent a year living by herself in the Lake District. “There’s a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night,” she says of her time there.

Other than the Lakes, Reward took shape later in different locations, including LA, Brooklyn and Cardiff, and saw Le Bon assemble a cast of musicians including Khouja and fellow co-producer Josiah Steinbrick, Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa on drums and percussion, Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxophone and Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Klinghoffer on guitars.

‘Daylight Matters’ was the first single to be lifted from Reward, followed by ‘Home To You’, both with accompanying videos. Casey Raymond directed ‘Daylight Matters’ and the latter was directed by visual artist and filmmaker Phil Collins.