The Clientele Announce New Album ‘I Am Not There Anymore’

This is their first material since 2017 and coming via legendary US label Merge.

London-based band The Clientele has announced their latest album, "I Am Not There Anymore", which is set to be released on July 28th by Merge. The first single and accompanying video from the album, “Blue Over Blue,” has also been shared. The album follows a seven-year hiatus from the band and 2017's "Music for the Age of Miracles". Recording sessions for the album started in 2019 and continued piecemeal until 2022, partly due to the pandemic and partly because the band wanted to experiment with incorporating elements of post-bop jazz, contemporary classical, and electronic music.

In "Blue Over Blue," the band's experimentation can be heard clearly, with percussive samples and moments where the arrangement opens up suddenly into something cinematic in scope, with horns and strings. The trio recorded a few tracks, took them home to experiment with different arrangements, and returned to the studio to finish recording all the little instrumental enhancements. The song itself depicts vocalist/lyricist/guitarist Alasdair MacLean's scary adventure of being lost in the woods with his son.

Throughout their 32-year career, The Clientele's music has been described as "ethereal," "shimmering," "hazy," "pretty," and "fragile." MacLean, however, has his own interpretation of the effect his music creates, stating that "It’s that feeling of not being there.” "I Am Not There Anymore" regularly evokes what MacLean calls “the feeling of not being real” and a lot of the lyrics were inspired by memories of the early summer in 1997, when his mother died.

The album consists of 19 tracks, extending from light bossa nova beats to the Clientele's classic chamber pop. There are also lovely instrumental interstitials that appear throughout the LP called "Radials," which change the focus in between songs. The cover image, taken from the 1823 Kameda Bōsai painting Long Life, is both a beautiful piece of abstract art and a poem about the distance and surprise of getting older.

As MacLean says, "I Am Not There Anymore" is all about “the memory of childhood but at the same time the impossibility of truly remembering childhood… or even knowing who or what you are.”