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Music

Hear Deerhunter's "Death In Midsummer," the First Single From Their New LP

'Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?,' the proper follow-up to 2015's 'Fading Frontier,' is out January 18 on 4AD.

Three years on from their much-loved LP Fading Frontier, indie iconoclasts Deerhunter have returned with a new single and details of a new album. "Death In Midsummer," the video for which you can watch at the top of the page, is the first single from the band's eighth proper studio LP, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, due out January 18 on 4AD.

The record was recorded between Texas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta with a team of producers that, as lead singer Brandon Cox indicated earlier this year, includes Welsh artist Cate LeBon. A press release doesn't give away much about the record's sound, nor does it attempt to downplay the band's ambition this time around: "Deerhunter have made a science fiction album about the present. Is it needed right now? Is it relevant? Perhaps only to a small audience. DADA was a reaction to the horrors of war. Punk was a reaction to the slow and vacant 70s. Hip-hop was a liberated musical culture that challenged the notions presented wholesale about the African-American experience. What is popular music today a reaction to?"

There are also brief comments on each song. The longest and most revealing is for "No One's Sleeping," the second song on the album: "On 16 June, 2016 Labor Party MP Helen Joanne Cox died after being shot and stabbed multiple times in Birstall by Thomas Mair, a mentally ill man with ties to a Neo-Nazi organization. He shouted 'Britain first' as he carried out the attack."

Watch the video for "Death In Midsummer" at the top of the page.

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