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Mar 15, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Mark James

Gruff Rhys, Welsh frontman of Super Furry Animals, has announced a new solo album, Seeking New Gods, and shared its first single, “Loan Your Loneliness,” via a video for the new song. Seeking New Gods is due out May 21 via Rough Trade. Watch “Loan Your Loneliness” video below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

Seeking New Gods is Rhys’ seventh solo album. It was recorded following a U.S. tour with his band. Mario C (Beastie Boys) mixed the album in Los Angeles.

Long-time Rhys collaborator Mark James art directed the album and directed the “Loan Your Loneliness” video, which a press release says “explores the narrative of a soloing guitarist accidentally inventing color TV with their sheer exuberance.”

Apparently, Seeking New Gods started off as a biography of an active volcano, Mount Paektu, on the Chinese-North Korean border. The press release explains that the more Rhys wrote, the more “he began to reflect on the inhuman timescale of the peak’s existence and the intimate features that have allowed mythologies to be built around it over centuries. Both the mountain and the songs became more and more personal to him as time went on.”

Rhys further explains: “The album is about people and the civilizations, and the spaces people inhabit over periods of time. How people come and go but the geology sticks around and changes more slowly. I think it’s about memory and time. It’s still a biography of a mountain, but now it’s a Mount Paektu of the mind. You won’t learn much about the real mountain from listening to this record but you will feel something, hopefully.”

In February Rhys released a new book, the amusingly titled Resist Phony Encores!, which a press release described as a “selective memoir.” For the book Rhys worked with designer Mark James, who provided Xeroxed graphics and doctored photos. The book included anecdotes from his life and also featured Rhys’ cue cards that he has used in live performances for 15 years now. Rhys did a performance version of Resist Phony Encores! as a “one-man slide show” at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018.

In 2014 Rhys released the book American Interior, which accompanied the album of the same name (there was also a film and mobile app). Last August, on Record Store Day, Rhys put out a new solo album of sorts, (Don’t) Welcome the Plague as a Blessing / The Babelsberg Basement Files, which was a companion piece to his 2018 album, Babelsberg, which was recorded with the 72-piece BBC National Orchestra of Wales. The new take featured the original versions of the songs, sans orchestra. The album was previewed via a video for the new album’s version of “Negative Vibes.” Rhys released another solo album, Pang!, in 2019 via Rough Trade.

Read our 16th Annual Artist Survey interview with Gruff Rhys.

Read our 2015 interview with Gruff Rhys about American Interior.

Seeking New Gods Tracklist:

1) Mausoleum of My Former Self
2) Can’t Carry On
3) Loan Your Loneliness
4) Seeking New Gods
5) Hiking In Lightning
6) Holiest of the Holy Men
7) The Keep
8) Everlasting Joy
9) Distant Snowy Peaks

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