Deerhunter Why

A quick scan of Deerhunter's body of work – which includes album and song titles like Fading Frontier and "Memory Boy" – serves as a reminder that the fleeting nature of life is something that has fascinated Bradford Cox and company for years. Until the band's eighth album, these meditations on ephemerality were deeply personal. On Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, Cox looks at the world around him with the same intensity that he used to examine his own life on earlier albums.

The British post-punk group arrived like a breath of fresh air with their Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, 'Love in the 4th Dimension' back in April 2017. Fronted by Juliette Jackson, The Big Moon unleashed song after song fizzing with melody and charm. This, their second album, was recorded in Atlanta alongside GRAMMY-winning US Producer Ben H. Allen III (M.I.A./Deerhunter/Bombay Bicycle Club).

It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon’s fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. “There’s a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night,” she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers — the first piano she had ever owned —for company, “windows closed to absolutely everyone”, and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider’s back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date.

It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon’s fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. “There’s a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night,” she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers — the first piano she had ever owned —for company, “windows closed to absolutely everyone”, and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider’s back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date.