Somewhere in the remotest pocket of yet-to-be-hyper-redeveloped Brooklyn, there’s this dingy six-corner intersection where Minimalist Psych Ave. crosses Krautrock St. and Electro-Noise Memorial Parkway. And on one of the intersection’s corners, there’s this shitty dive bar with no sign out front. And that’s where — following a blue streak of eclectic releases earlier in the century and the eventual loss of their studio, “the Ocropolis,” to an aggressively-gentrifying Williamsburg — the art rock fivesome Oneida has been holed-up for the past six years.
But thankfully, “the man” can never keep THE ROCKERS down for too long; and today, the Oneida boys are once again straightening their hair (a little), tucking in their shirts, and setting foot into the cold, hideous light of the New York day to announce that Romance (their first new studio album since 2012’s A List of the Burning Mountains) is coming at us on March 3 via Joyful Noise Recordings.
Seeing as how their old studio space is probably a men’s hair salon or a Crossfit box or a something by now, the band says that the new LP’s constituent 11 tracks came together “over several years in various locales” and were built around “deeply developed long-arc rhythm/phase concepts, noise, yearning, blind guitar rage, longing, the lurch of dying electronics, and a multi-modal embrace of human fallibility and artifice.”
And to help get the homecoming party started, the band is also sharing first single “All In Due Time,” a genuinely muscle-y Krautrock shuffle that is (somehow) hypnotic and disorienting at the same damn time. “In Oneida, there are both regular metrical pulses/units, and more organically-derived rhythms that seem at first to be completely free, or working in opposition/dissonant periods to the regular stuff,” Oneida’s Bobby Matador says; “but they eventually reach a rhythmic harmony ‘in due time’ — and it’s not necessarily scripted or composed, but we understand how to use this technique and let it unfold in the moment.”
Speaking of “due time,” Oneida will be hitting the road a little bit later this spring too, beginning with a record release show in Brooklyn on March 3 before spreading the Gospel of Romance to the Midwest and East Coast. For now though, get warm and/or fuzzy with “All In Due Time” down below, check out the full tracklist and upcoming road schedule, and head here to pre-order yourself some Romance while there’s still plenty left to go around.
Romance tracklisting:
01. Economy Travel
02. Bad Habit
03. All In Due Time
04. It Was Me
05. Good Lie
06. Lay of the Land
07. Cedars
08. Reputation
09. Cockfight
10. Good Cheer
11. Shepherd’s Axe
Oneida tour dates:
03.03.18 – Brooklyn, NY – Secret Project Robot
03.16.18 – Indianapolis, IN – The Hifi
03.17.18 – Chicago, IL – The Empty Bottle
03.18.18 – Kansas City, MO – Union Library
03.19.18 – Hot Springs, AR – Low Key Arts
03.21.18 – Raleigh, NC – King’s
03.22.18 – Atlanta, GA – 529
03.23.18 – Knoxville, TN – Pilot Light
03.24.18 – Baltimore, MD – Ottobar
04.21.18 – Providence, RI – AS220
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