Ed Harcourt has announced his new album ‘El Magnifico’ and shared the first single ‘Strange Beauty’.
The UK singer-songwriter will release ‘El Magnifico’ on March 29, 2024 via his own imprint, Deathless Recordings. It’s available to pre-order or pre-save here.
The accompanying music video for ‘Strange Beauty’, which captures the “classic old feeling of love”, is also out now and serves as the first taster of the full LP.
Check out the video below.
The music video for ‘Strange Beauty’ was shot in Almeria, southern Spain by Steve Gullick, while Harcourt’s self-produced ‘El Magnifico’ was recorded at his own Wolf Cabin studios. Finishing touches were made alongside producer Dave Izumi Lynch at Eastbourne’s Echo Zoo Studio.
Speaking about the new track in a press statement, Harcourt described it as “a song that uses visceral imagery to convey that classic old feeling of love and the immense power it has”.
He continued: “I think that even after being a reckless, naive romantic after all these years, I still want to describe how violently mad it can make one feel. It’s about escapism, there’s an us against the world aspect, not adhering to the confines of society I guess. The song was written a while back and then lurked in a drawer for a few years…then I gave it the kiss of life and it sprung back with magnificent vigour!”
The tracklist for ‘El Magnifico’ is:
1. ‘1987’
2. ‘Into The Loving Arms Of Your Enemy’
3. ‘Broken Keys’
4. ‘Strange Beauty’
5. ‘The Violence Of The Rose’
6. ‘Ghost Ship’
7. ‘Deathless’
8. ‘Anvils & Hammers’
9. ‘My Heart Can’t Keep Up With My Mind’
10. ‘At The Dead Of The World’
11. ‘Seraphina’
12. ‘El Magnifico’
“I think as a songwriter you do get to a point where you’re aware of your past and what you’ve done,” Harcourt said of ‘El Magnifico”s fresh direction. “It’s knowing what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, but also knowing how to better yourself by doing things you haven’t done before.”
“I find that I’m always learning,” he added. “When I’m writing with someone else it’s always a total blank canvas so you have to be open to trying new things. It means with every record I do myself it’s got to have something different in it. Every album is always a reaction to the last thing I did. After the ‘Furnaces’, which was quite heavy and experimental, I felt it was time I went back to the source a bit. So maybe there is a sense here of drawing on what people perhaps know me for, but there is also a big step forward.”
Harcourt concluded: “One of the important things with the record for me is that it feels like a combination of everything that I’ve done, yet it’s also opened up so many new possibilities.”
The artist’s most recent LP was the soundscape album ‘Monochrome To Colour’ in 2020.
