The New Pornographers are back with a new song, “Really Really Light,” which leads an album called Continue as a Guest. The LP is out March 31, via Merge, and you can hear the single below. The song, co-written with sometime member Dan Bejar, comes with a Christian Cerezo–directed video in which the dancer Svetlana Tulasi ice-skates across an iceless warehouse. Check out the tracklist and Amy Casey’s album art below.
“Really Really Light” is refashioned from a track left off the 2014 LP Brill Bruisers, A.C. Newman said in a press release. “Part of my process throughout the years has been messing with things I never finished,” the frontperson added. “I really liked Dan’s chorus, and for a while I was just trying to write something that I felt like belonged with it. I was thinking of the Aloe Blacc song ‘The Man’ which interpolated the chorus from Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ and thought it would be fun to interpolate a song that no one knows. Not trying to sound like Aloe Blacc, just doing some interpolating of my own. It became a game of writing a verse that felt like a part of the same song. In my mind, I was striving for a little Jeff Lynne–era Tom Petty, a classic go-to.” Another track on the LP, “Firework in the Falling Snow,” was co-written with Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis.
Of the album title, Newman said, “The idea of continuing as a guest felt very apropos to the times,” he explains. “Feeling out of place in culture, in society—not feeling like a part of any zeitgeist, but happy to be separate and living your simple life, your long fade-out. Find your own little nowhere, find some space to fall apart, continue as a guest.”
The New Pornographers’ last album was 2019’s In the Morse Code of Brake Lights. In 2021, they reissued Mass Romantic. Continue as a Guest is the band’s Merge debut.
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