PORTUGAL. THE MAN ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM WOODSTOCK
OUT JUNE 16
AND DROP NEW TRACK NUMBER ONE
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE
PORTUGAL. THE MAN have announced the arrival of their much anticipated new album,WOODSTOCK, out June 16th. The album is available to pre-order now at all DSPs, with all orders accompanied by an instant grat download of the new track, Number One, and previously released album tracks Feel It Still and Noise Pollution. In addition, over the weekend PORTUGAL. THE MAN released the video for Number One.
WOODSTOCK’s last single Feel It Still will be accompanied by a number of exciting remixes from Lido, Medasin, Zhu, and Flatbush Zombies, all due in the weeks preceding the release of WOODSTOCK.
Feel It Still is also joined by two unique visuals, a standard clip, now with over 1.6M views on YouTube, and an interactive companion video created by the band in partnership with global creative agencyWieden + Kennedy. The clip – which originally premiered via Noisey – is both an electrifying music video as well as an interactive toolkit for protesting social injustice. Directed by Ian Schwartz at Prettybird,Feel It Still asks viewers to find hidden Easter eggs designed to help #theresistance movement, including a direct dial to the White House, a video explaining the legal rights of protestors, donation sites for Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, custom-designed protest posters and stencil kits for resistance graffiti. Built on the Wirewax interactive video platform, Feel Is Still can be viewed now at feelitstill.com.
In celebration of 4/20, Portugal. The Man and Wieden + Kennedy teamed up again, this time with Oregon cannabis grower Hifi Farms to release Feel it Still, a custom, packaged, pre-rolled blend designed to pair with the new single/video. A top shelf blend of hybrid strains Gorilla Glue #4 and Girl Scout Cookies,Feel It Still arrived last week at all Serra Cannabis and Electric Lettuce recreational dispensaries.
PTM’s last album came out over three years ago—a long gap for a band who’ve dropped roughly an album a year since 2006. And in true, prolific band fashion, they’ve spent almost every minute since 2013 working on an album called Gloomin + Doomin. They created a shit-ton of individual songs, but as a whole, none of them hung together in a way that felt right. Then John Gourley, PTM’s lead singer, made a trip home to Wasilla, Alaska, (Home of Portugal. The Man’s biggest fan, Sarah Palin) and two things happened that completely changed the album’s trajectory.
First, John got some parental tough love from his old man, who called John on the proverbial carpet or dogsled or whatever you put people on when you want to yell at them in Alaska. “What’s taking so long to finish the album?”John’s dad asked. “Isn’t that what bands do? Write songs and then put them out?” Like fathers and unlicensed therapists tend to do, John’s dad cut him deep. The whole thing started John thinking about why the band seemed to be stuck on a musical elliptical machine from hell and, more importantly, about how to get off of it.
Second, fate stuck its wiener in John’s ear again when he found his dad’s ticket stub from the original 1969 Woodstock music festival. It seems like a small thing, but talking to his dad about Woodstock ’69 knocked something loose in John’s head. He realized that, in the same tradition of bands from that era, Portugal. The Man needed to speak out about the world crumbling around them. With these two ideas converging, the band made a seemingly bat-shit-crazy decision: they took all of the work they had done for the three years prior and they threw it out.
It wasn’t easy and there was the constant threat that the band’s record label might have them killed, but the totally insane decision paid off. With new, full-on, musical boners, the band went back to the studio—working with John Hill (In The Mountain In The Cloud), Danger Mouse (Evil Friends), Mike D (Everything Cool), and longtime collaborator Casey Bates (The one consistent producer since the first record). In this new-found creative territory, the album that became Woodstock rolled out naturally from there.
Remember that mountain of burning needles we were talking about? Good. Because Woodstock is an album (Including the new single Feel It Still) that—with optimism and heart—points at the giant pile and says, “Hey, this pile is fucked up!” And if you think that pile is fucked up too, you owe it to yourself—hell, to all of us—to get out there and do something about it.
FOLLOW PORTUGAL. THE MAN
OFFICIAL WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE
No Comments