Yo La Tengo - This Stupid World (2023)

Coming February 10 2023: the first new studio album in five years from Yo La Tengo, This Stupid World. Recorded at YLT’s practice space in Hoboken NJ, the new material captures the collaborative energy and eclecticism that has defined the band’s career as it enters its 40th year. The double LP features a 10th track on Side D available exclusively on vinyl. The trio returns to NYC’s Bowery Ballroom for their storied annual eight-night Hanukkah residency this December before touring across North America throughout 2023.

Weird and wonderful, Yo La Tengo's 17th album finds the trio feeling experimental and self-indulgent (not a bad thing here), and comfortable stretching waaaaay out—three of the nine songs go over seven minutes. Among them is opener "Sinatra Drive Breakdown," which immediately cruises in on a cool, nervy groove before fuzzed-out guitar elbows its way in and eventually falls into what seems like a nervous breakdown: messy, atonal, slippery and hard to grasp. Ira Kaplan's voice sounds calm and low until Georgia Hubley sneaks in behind him, even calmer and lower. The union isn't exactly one of harmony, but more like someone trying to guess what you're about to say. "Fallout," by comparison, comes on bright and excitable like a noisy version of the Byrds. "I want to fall out of time/ Reach back unwind/ Before it gets too loud/ Before it knocks me out," Kaplan sings. There are real suck it and see moments, like on the menacing "Brain Capers," which finds Kaplan trying out a low growl and then backing himself up with the brooding muscle of guitar. "Until It Happens" has a nervous-energy rhythm, like city traffic—and a tango vibe. ("Prepare to die," Kaplan, now 66, warns like a pragmatic life-insurance salesman. "Prepare yourself while there's still time.") He shrugs on J.J. Cale eccentricity for the delightfully oddball "Tonight's Episode," bragging about his yo-yo skills: "I can walk the dog/ I can around the world/ Rock that cradle, too." As Hubley's post-punk drum beat slides into a shuffle and bassist James McNew layers on prowling blues, Kaplan turns his guitar noise into this slow-moving feedback. But it's not so much shoegaze as its own atmosphere, the kind of thing that would cause people in a movie to cringe and cover their ears. (You won't want to cover yours.) Hubley opens "Aselestine"—gentle Glen Campbell country with Lou Reed Loaded vibes—with a soft giggle and a resigned lament: "The drugs don't do what they said they'd do." But the best line on the record is Kaplan's on the jammy "Apology Letter": "Then I got mad because you got mad/ Another one of my delightful quirks/ What a jerk." The extended closers are just under 15 minutes of blissed-out meditation. "This Stupid World" is tense, like heavy gray storm clouds that never quite erupt, so that its tribal drum beat goes from maddening to hypnotic. And "Miles Away" delivers, of all things, an industrial goth feel before Hubley floats in with ethereal vocals; eventually, it all spaces out, like some '70s retro-futuristic AI symphony.

Tracklist
1 Sinatra Drive Breakdown
2 Fallout
3 Tonight's Episode
4 Aselestine
5 Until It Happens
6 Apology Letter
7 Brain Capers
8 This Stupid World
9 Miles Away