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Music

Karen O and Danger Mouse's New, Nine-Minute-Long Song Is Goddamned Palatial

"Lux Prima," released overnight, is the first single from a collaborative LP, due out next year.

Danger Mouse and Karen O could have nudged their new collaboration in any number of directions. For starters, Danger Mouse produced Parquet Courts's sneakily excellent Wide Awake earlier this year, and it's not as though Karen O is any sort of stranger to jagged, Lower East Side art-punk. Instead, "Lux Prima," the first single from an album due out sometime next year*, is a lush, string-laden, nine-minute-long mini-epic that calls back to the languidness of late-90s downtempo as much as it does the balladry of Resistance Radio.

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"After making music for the past twenty years and embarking on making this record with Danger Mouse I knew a couple things," Karen O said in a statement. "One was that the spirit of collaboration between us was going to be a pure one, and two was that the more I live the less is clear to me. When you create from a blurry place you can go places further than you’ve ever been. I think we both were excited to go far out."

Danger Mouse added: ""With 'Lux Prima,' we were really looking for a place rather than a sound. It was our first shared destination so we thought we’d take our time getting there. The song itself is a bit of a journey, but all the parts felt like they needed each other."

Listen to "Lux Prima" at the top of the page.

*UPDATE: An earlier version of this piece said that the LP was due out December 14. It's not.

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