Listen to of Montreal's cathartic 'Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck'

July 29, 2022

“Does anything feel more tailor-made for these chaotic times than frontperson Kevin Barnes’ knack for combining upbeat melodies with the bleakest of lyrics?” - AV Club

"…raises eyebrows as much as it sets the listener off-kilter with sonic angles and crunches. It’s a delightful album meant to break up internal pain and the predictable pop on today’s Top 40." - American Songwriter

“It’s like taking a sonorous, mind-boggling rollercoaster ride with Stereolab and T.Rex.” - KCRW

When creators fClive Barker's Imajica, Andrei Tarkovsky's sci-fi classic Solaris, and Godard's Alphaville. But what happens to artists when the flow of time gets f^cked up IRL? When an hour stretches into eternity, and the voices in your head begin to echo through empty rooms?

If you’re Kevin Barnes, the creative visionary behind of Montreal, Freewave Lucifer fck happens.

Isolation and uncertainty loomed throughout the genesis of the band’s latest studio album, available now digitally. Vinyl arrives September 9 – pre-order your Early Bird copy on Cloudy Yellow. The band shared the final psychedelic-pop single "Nightsift" today alongside an appropriately trippy video created by David Barnes. Watch below.

Kevin describes this record as, “Paranoia/isolation/self-terror/terror-self, the failure spectacle, the take down, sex as a means of identity denial, the kaleidoscopic world of regret and shame, the liberation of mockery, adolescent nightmares reborn and reimagined, torture echolocation with non-eventual silence”.

These expansive selections contrast markedly with the focused pop of 2020’s UR FUN, which was crafted for visceral thrills and the concert stage. As it was for countless musicians around the world, the inability to tour eliminated one of the linchpins of Kevin's creative process. Denied social interaction and diverse experiences, they delved inward. They contemplated how time functions in music and experimented accordingly. These new songs, dense with ideas but short on repetition, feel epic in scope despite reasonable running times. Like the staircases of M.C. Escher’s Relativity, the discrete sections of "Marijuana's A Working Woman" and "Blab Sabbath Lathe of Maiden" crisscross and pivot, confounding the senses yet commanding attention.

The imagery and sentiments that bubble forth from Barnes’ lyrical wordplay prove equally disorienting. “Is it important to say black chrome rodents?,” asks Barnes on “Après The Déclassé.” Phrases borne of free association took on new meaning when introduced into a song. “It’s like collaborating with my subconscious in a way. It feels deeply personal, even though I don’t necessarily understand it at that moment.”

Other influences woven throughout include realist painter Edward Hopper, fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin, cinéaste Pedro Almodovar, and erotic illustrator Toshio Saeki. of Montreal likens their compositional process to making collages from seemingly unrelated source materials, combining them in provocative ways to reveal new meanings. “I wasn’t working with specific themes that I wanted to try and stretch over a three-minute pop song. It was sewing together a lot of fragmented thoughts,” which ties in nicely to the ‘freewave’ aspect of the album title’s meaning. As Barnes explains, “Freewave is my term for wild and intractable artistic expression. Lucifer is the angel of enlightenment and elucidation. Fuck is something we say when things are going really well, or really badly.”

As for anything else going on behind the scenes during the genesis of Freewave Lucifer fck, Barnes opts to preserve the mystery. “Sometimes in the past, I felt it was important for people to know certain things, so they could get into a specific headspace.” Not this time. “The last couple of years laid a heavy trip on everybody’s psyche. There are plenty of universal things here to identify with.”

of Montreal will embark on an extensive North American tour beginning this September with support from Locate S,1. Tickets are onsale now for what will be sure to be a spectacularly over-the-top live show of epicly disorienting proportions!