Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.
Beirut have released “Gallipoli,” the first single off their forthcoming album of the same name, out Feb. 1, 2019, on 4AD. The album will be the band’s first since 2015’s No No No.
Beirut frontman Zach Condon shared a note last week detailing the history and conception of the record. “We stumbled into the medieval-fortressed island town of Gallipoli one night and followed a brass band procession fronted by priests carrying a statue of the town’s saint through the winding narrow streets behind what seemed like the entire town,” Condon wrote in the note. “The next day I wrote the song entirely in one sitting, pausing only to eat.”
Paste pondered the meaning of Gallipoli after the note was shared—was it a place? A song? An album? It appears now that it’s all three, as well as a time in Condon’s life. Condon said the album came to him after rediscovering his Farfisa organ, the instrument on which he wrote much of 2006’s Gulag Orkestar and 2007’s The Flying Club Cup. While the organ stayed at his home in New York, Condon began to spend more time in Berlin, eventually moving there to live full-time, which led to the aforementioned exodus through the streets of Gallipoli.
It’s that combination of nostalgia and new experiences that courses through the song “Gallipoli.” Condon’s unique brand of baroque pop is alive and well, full of joy, wonder and invention in equal measure. It shuffles like the religious procession Condon and company shadowed that fateful day in its namesake city. The flugelhorn rises, the timpani rolls and, of course, the Farfisa, too, fluttering along behind the whole thing, a reminder of where the band has come from. It’s a testament to how much has changed, and how little at the same time.