Album of the Week – 17/04/26

This week sees a new release from Nine Inch Nails. It’s a collaborative musical project between Nine Inch Nails and German-Iraqi electronic music producer Boys Noize (Alexander Ridha), and they’re calling it Nine Inch Noize.

There’s also a new release from some indie royalty, in the form of Tanya Donelly (Belly) and Chris Brokaw (Codeine), called The Done Is Done Again. It’s only an EP, so not in the running for this slot! Another unusual one and quite a step away from the guitar hooks of Belly.

For our Album of the Week, we’ve gone with some quirky pop, in the form of They Might Be Giants!

Album of the Week – The World Is to Dig –  They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants treat the entire history of popular music as a trampoline rather than a rulebook. Like two pinballs pinging off of each other through musical murals stretching into a giddy ether, They Might Be Giants move by ricochet. On The World Is to Dig, the multi-

Grammy-winning duo continues bouncing through the pop multiverse, digging into whatever they find with playful zeal. John Linnell and John Flansburgh continue to fire ideas off one another like particles in a perpetual motion experiment, each collision producing a new angle, a new joke, a new melodic left turn, resulting in tracks packed with esoteric references, mischievous details, and left-field detours. Untethered from trends, immune to nostalgia, and equally ready to draw from Tin Pan Alley theatrics and contemporary pop culture references, The World Is to Dig is the sound of a band very much in motion; not chasing relevance but generating it on their own terms.

That sense of motion is no accident. For Flansburgh, the freedom of They Might Be Giants has always come from refusing to plant a flag in any single approach. “There’s a tremendous advantage to being in a project that is open-ended,” he says. “We can do something that’s straight-ahead punk or dig into Count Basie, and that keeps things zesty. The people with their arms folded in the back row might wonder, ‘Do these guys still have it?’ To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure we ever ‘had it’ but the truth is, right now, we’ve got something new.”

“I think both John and I are kind of professionally dysmorphic,” Flansburgh continues. “When I think of rock culture, I don’t think of our band as having any place in it. I never think about where we land in the world.” The album’s gestation followed a similar creative pattern: each John would workshop ideas in their home studio only to bring the best ones into a fluid musical conversation, at which point they became inextricably They Might Be Giants-ified. At that point in the process, Flansburgh adds, The World Is To Dig gained some added fluidity. “This album, like our first album, was all made by the same people at the same time in the same place. It has its own musical universe,” he says. “Even as songs pull apart and get further afield, it became naturally cohesive. Our most successful records hang together in very natural ways, and this album has that continuity.” Linnell agrees, noting that the duo’s penchant for brevity aids in that strength: “Very early on, we admired bands that had short songs that said what they had to say and finished. There was this movement in the mid-20th century to write confessional poems full of very specific personal emotion, but I want to write about geostationary orbits. That would be an interesting poem for me. And speaking for Flansburgh, there’s something beautifully opaque and elliptical about his recent lyrical ideas.”

“We do this for ourselves. We’re trying to make the kind of album that we would be interested in,” Linnell says. In the end, the project acts as a thesis: a duo of funny, intelligent, creative musicians still primarily guided by genuine affection for songs, ideas, and moments that move them. On The World Is to Dig, that instinct remains They Might Be Giants’ greatest constant: proof that curiosity, love, and joy are more sustaining than any trend, and that chasing those emotions naturally will always result in new discoveries.

Albums of Note: 

— Nine Inch Nails – Nine Inch Noize

— Tanya Donelly and Chris Brokaw – The Done Is Done Again EP

April 17th:

— Accessory – Dust

— Adrian Younge – YOUNGE

— Anne Hathaway – Mother Mary: Greatest Hits

— Arkells – Between Us

— ARY – DARKSTAR

— Beaming – horseshoe

— Beastie Boys – To the 5 Boroughs (Deluxe Edition)

— Bejamin Tod – Vengeance and Grace

— EZRA – Whippersnap

— Fast Money Music – Fast Money Music

— Fiona-Lee – Every Woman EP

— Flying Lotus – 1983 (Reissue)

— From Ashes to New – Reflections

— Gem Club – Emerald Press

— Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns – Bitches Blues

— Honey Dijon – Nightlife

— I’m With Her – Sing Me Alive

— Kathryn Mohr – Carve

— La Peste – I Don’t Know Right From Wrong: Lost La Peste 1976-1979 Vol. 1

— LØLØ – god forbid a girl spits out her feelings

— Los Pulpitos – Tentacletek

— Lucy Liyou – Mr Cobra

— M.I.A. – M.I.7

— Marc Broussard – Chance Worth Taking

— Motörhead – On Parole Sessions

— Nekrogoblikon – The Boiling Sea EP

— Nine Inch Nails – Nine Inch Noize

— Prince Daddy & the Hyena – Hotwire Trip Switch

— Protoje – The Art of Acceptance

— Sean Solomon – The World Is Not Good Enough

— Seether – Beneath The Surface EP

— Skindred – You Got This

— SOFIA ISELLA – Something is a shell . EP

— Sofiane Pamart – MOVIE

— Souled American – Sanctions

— Tanya Donelly and Chris Brokaw – The Done Is Done Again EP

— Teen Suicide – Nude descending staircase headless

— This Is Lorelei – Box for Buddy, Box for Star (Super Deluxe)

— TIGA – HOTLIFE

— TOMORA (The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands and AURORA) – COME CLOSER

— Vanessa Carlton – Veils

— Wage War – It Calls Me By My Name EP

— Warren Zevon – Epilogue: Live At The Edmonton Folk Music Festival (Vinyl Release)

— Yaya Bay – Fidelity

— Yot Club – Simpleton

— ZAYN – KONNAKOL