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May 15, 2020 By Christopher Roberts The Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields have released a new album, Quickies, today via Nonesuch. Now that the album’s out you can stream the whole thing below. Also, today we posted our review of the album. You can read that here. Quickies is a five-EP box set with 28 semi-short songs.

Previously we posted the album’s singles “The Day The Politicians Died” and “I’ve Got a Date With Jesus.” They also shared the singles “Kraftwerk In a Blackout,” and “(I Want To Join a) Biker Gang.”

In addition to lead singer and songwriter Stephin Merritt, Quickies features band members Sam Daval, Claudia Gonson, Shirley Simms, and John Woo, as well as Chris Ewen, Daniel Handler, and Pinky Weitzman. This is the Magnetic Fields’ first major project since 2017’s 50 Song Memoir.

Merritt had this to say in a previous statement about the album: “I’ve been reading a lot of very short fiction, and I enjoyed writing 101 Two-Letter Words, the poetry book about the shortest words you can use in Scrabble. And I’ve been listening to a lot of French baroque harpsichord music. Harpsichord doesn’t lend itself to languor. So I’ve been thinking about one instrument at a time, playing for about a minute or so and then stopping, and I’ve been thinking of narratives that are only a few lines long.

“Also, I had been using a lot of small notebooks, so when I reach the bottom of the page, I’ve only gone a short way. Now that I’m working on a different album, I’m enforcing a large notebook rule so that I don’t do Quickies twice in a row.”

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