GRAMMY-winning French band Phoenix are thrilled to unveil the latest song, “Winter Solstice,” from their upcoming album Alpha Zulu set for release on November 4th, 2022 on Loyaute/Glassnote Records. A standout track from the album, the song might be the band’s most moody, a melancholic rumination that gradually pulses from dark into light. It is the band’s only song that wasn’t composed together in the studio, instead created in two different continents for the first time in the band’s history. The track was built out of a long loop that the band’s members – Lauren Brancowitz, Christian Mazzalai, and Deck D’Arcy – sent to front man Thomas Mars, asking him to record a stream of consciousness, a song that loosely alludes to Phoenix classics like “Love Like A Sunset Pt. 1 and 2” and “Bankrupt,” but sounds like something new entirely.

In conjunction with the release, the band share a music video directed by prior Ti Amo collaborator Warren Fu and Saoli Nash, who drew on the band’s German Expressionist movie influences. If “Winter Solstice” looks to fill the void that was created by the distance of the pandemic, the video faces the void head on.  About the video the directors said, “We love the slow pace and painterly compositions of early cinema. The stark simplicity of orthochromatic film and analogue techniques fit the song like a glove… if songs had hands and needed gloves.”

Produced by the band themselves, and recorded in Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which sits in the Palais du Louvre, Alpha Zulu is everything Phoenix does best: effortlessly catchy melodies married with always-innovative production, resulting in what is destined to be one of 2022’s albums of the year. Indeed, Alpha Zulu – the band’s first album since 2017’s critically acclaimed record Ti Amo – is an immediate reminder of what has made Phoenix one of the most beloved artists of the last two decades, reinforcing the band’s enduring – and continued – influence on pop culture.

There’s a new looseness here for Phoenix, a clash of emotions, styles and eras borne from the mad stylistic incubator that is the Musée des Arts Décoratifs: “The Only One,” with its blissful rain-drop percussion, clashes against the pummeling, almost techno-strafed “All Eyes on Me”; there’s a focus on “negative space” – a concept echoed in the white walls around the museum’s exhibits – and a sense of pure romance, albeit tinged with a mature understanding of how precious that feeling becomes with age. “My Elixir,” a lonely, distant song with a sweetly rinky-dink beat that has the air of the karaoke sung in an empty bar. “Tell me anywhere is home,” Thomas pleads in the song: “Can we go home?” He was thinking about how on Ti Amo, Phoenix finally said “I love you” – “but in a different language”, he admits. Now living in an increasingly apocalyptic-seeming US, the situation called for directness. It was then that

Photo Courtesy: Shervin Lainez