Jens Lekman has announced his new album, Life Will See You Now, due out February 17th via Secretly Canadian. This fourth album is a typical Lekman album in several ways: sly humor is key to its heartfelt nature; it inverts pop’s writing norm by making songs with sad concerns sound happy and songs with a happy subject sound sad; and it plays with notions of identity and the self.
But, as the title suggests, it also represents a significant move forward, as if across a threshold. I Know What Love Isn’t (2012) was informed by a painful relationship breakdown that pitched its author into something of a crisis and so necessarily put him at its center, using a muted sound palette.
But Life Will See You Now is the more expansive, upbeat sound of a revitalized Lekman, who is just one of many characters in his new stories about the magic and messiness of different kinds of relationships. It’s also the result of deliberate steps he took to create this fresh sound.
Lekman experiments with different kinds of rhythms – disco, calypso, samba and bossa nova all get a bespoke twirl in the spotlight – and so he called on producer Ewan Pearson (M83, The Chemical Brothers, Goldfrapp) to help realize his new songs.
Released today along with the album announcement, the obviously upbeat lead single “What’s That Perfume That You Wear?” (below) features steel pans sample from Ralph MacDonald’s “The Path” of 1978 – “one of my favorite records ever,” enthuses Lekman.
Lekman will embark on a headline tour of North America in February and March 2017 with a full band, including shows at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles and Bowery Ballroom and Music Hall of Williamsburg in New York City. He will also tour the UK and Scandinavia in March and April 2017. All dates
