Amusement Parks on Fire are set to release their long awaited album titled ‘An Archaea’ tomorrow (June 25th). APOK is one of those bands that long ago found their sound, but now we have a more evolved APOK. A more experimental APOK. We get an album a long time in the making and, more importantly, we get an album from a band that knows what an album means. A set of songs meant to inspire and take you on a journey. Or with you on a journey. The hooks are unexpected and prominent. The guitars make you want to play guitar. The surreal, at times, and vivid at others, doesn’t detract the overall sound. It enhances it. This is a concept as much as it is an album.
About Amusement Parks On Fire & ‘An Archaea’
After taking what they called a ’88-month moratorium’, Amusement Parks On Fire are ready to unveil An Archaea, their first new album in over a decade. The album is set for release on 25th June via EGB Global and it’s going to be available on vinyl, CD and digital formats.
Drawing from innumerable, often entirely unanticipated musical approaches whilst defying direct description, this new record sounds simultaneously uncanny, utterly unique and yet unmistakably the work of Amusement Parks On Fire.
Recorded entirely at the band’s ‘underground bunker’ rehearsal space studio The Pentagon in Nottingham, England by multi-instrumentalist and de facto tour manager Gavin Poole, finishing touches gave way to previously unimaginable world events that retroactively fed into the radioactive fabric of An Archaea.
Timeless though also all-so timely, the record is inadvertently a reluctant future relic of a strange and confounding stint in spacetime. It’s a work that seeks to highlight this abstraction by subverting our mode of being. It’s a labor of life-and-death that seeks to find freedom and even tentative optimism in catharsis.
Born as the eremitic endeavour of an adolescent Michael Feerick, Amusement Parks On Fire emanated in around 2004 with the release of the eponymous debut album. Released on Geoff Barrow (Portishead, Beak>)’s Invada label, it was described by the New Musical Express as ‘hedonistic teenage genius’.
After a series of concept singles acclaimed by the likes of Rough Trade and Drowned in Sound and following several years of international incidence, in 2009 the band crash-landed in Los Angeles to make the sun-drenched tertiary release Road Eyes. Influential magazine Alternative Press characterized it as ‘a near-perfect album’.
The enigmatic art-rock lifers then took a self-described ’88-month moratorium’ for undisclosed reasons, making a surprise recrudescence in 2017 with the single Our Goal To Realise, the EP All The New Ends and a European tour in 2018, with the promise of a new full-length delivery to follow shortly thereafter.
Featured image by Carla Mundy.
Buy Links:
https://apof.co.uk/an-archaea-vinyl
https://apof.co.uk/an-archaea-cd
LINKS:
https://apof.co.uk
https://www.facebook.com/amusementparksonfire
https://twitter.com/APOF
