LCD Soundsystem Is Back With Two New Songs, “American Dream” and “Call the Police”

Music News LCD Soundsystem
LCD Soundsystem Is Back With Two New Songs, “American Dream” and “Call the Police”

As promised, dance-punk perennials LCD Soundsystem put out two new songs last night, and you can hear them now below. These are the first new tracks from James Murphy and co. since 2015’s one-off bummer jam, “Christmas Will Break Your Heart.”

“Call the Police” begins in similarly bleak territory: “We all know this is nothing / This is nowhere,” Murphy sings to open the track, his vocals intertwined with uplifting guitars that call to mind Bowie’s “Heroes.” From there, Pat Mahoney’s drums jump in and it’s off to the races—the hard-charging dance-rock odyssey stretches past seven minutes, but manages to feel instead like a gloriously fleeting burst of escapist mania.

“American Dream,” on the other hand, feels dreamier, more garbled—Murphy’s voice itself is far more sorrowful here, even as he offers what reassurances he can: “But that’s okay / And that’s okay.” Gossamer synths surround his howls and the track crescendos until collapsing just past the six-minute mark, as if it can’t bear the weight of all that disappointment anymore. It’s bittersweet, but this is nothing if not a triumphant return for LCD.

“i (james) mixed ‘american dream’ DFA Studios, and my friend dave sardy mixed ‘call the police’ at his sweet place in LA last week,” wrote Murphy in a Facebook post yesterday. ”[We] shuttled them quickly to the great bob weston (at Chicago Mastering Service) to master them so we could get them out today.”

The band’s new record is in the final stages now—”seriously almost done with the LP,” Murphy wrote in the same post—and we could not be more excited for it.

Listen to “American Dream” and “Call the Police” below, or via your streaming service of choice here, and enjoy a couple of live cuts from a 2007 LCD show via the Paste Cloud player further down.

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