Zach Condon is back with Hadsel, his first album as Beirut since 2019. The record arrives November 10th via Condon’s label Pompeii Records, and lead single “So Many Plans” is out now.
In true Beirut fashion, Hadsel is named after a place that particularly inspired Condon. The artist traveled to the northern Norway island in early 2020, after a bout of acute laryngitis forced him to cancel Beiruit’s tour in support of Gallipoli and before COVID-19 shut the world down. During his retreat, Condon wrote on an old Hadselkirke, the first church organ the multi-instrumentalist ever played. In a statement, he described this time as especially therapeutic.
“During my time in Hadsel, I worked hard on the music, lost in a trance and stumbling blindly through my own mental collapse that I had been pushing aside since I was a teenager,” Condon said. “It came and rang me like a bell. I was left agonising many things past and present while the beauty of the nature, the northern lights and fearsome storms played an awesome show around me. The few hours of light would expose the unfathomable beauty of the mountains and the fjords, and the hours-long twilights would fill me with subdued excitement. I’d like to believe that scenery is somehow present in the music.”
You don’t initially hear that Hadselkirke in “So Many Plans.” Instead, you hear a ukulele, which adds a harmonious quality to Beirut’s meditation on all that was paused by the pandemic.
“I liked that this song struck a balance between the feelings of acceptance, hope and giving up,” Condon said of the single. “The lyric came from a covid-times lament that rolled effortlessly into a kind of short lullaby. The instruments were somewhat unusual for me at the time, having dusted off a baritone uke I never used before to join the album’s primary instruments of either pump or church organ and the modular synthesizer as percussion and bass.” Listen to Beirut try out those instruments below.
Pre-orders for Hadsel are ongoing. The LP follows Beirut’s 2022 compilation album Artifacts.
Hadsel Artwork:
Hadsel Tracklist:
01. Hadsel
02. Arctic Forest
03. Baion
04. So Many Plans
05. Melbu
06. Stokmarknes
07. Island Life
08. Spillhaugen
09. January 18th
10. Süddeutsches Ton-Bild-Studio
11. The Tern
12. Regulatory
