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Apr 02, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Joseph Bird Jr

Apr 02, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Joseph Bird Jr

LA Priest (aka England’s Sam Eastgate) has announced a new EP, La Fusion, and shared its first single, “City Warm Heart,” via a music video. La Fusion is due out May 3 via Domino. Check out the new single below, followed by the EP’s tracklist and cover artwork, as well as LA Priest’s upcoming tour dates.

“I wrote this song in the Costa Rican jungle as I pictured myself returning to tour the cities of the world again,” says Eastgate in a press release. “It’s sort of a mantra to face the outside world from somewhere like that.”

Joseph Bird Jr directed the video for “City Warm Heart.” Eastgate had this to say about it in the press release: “I thought it would be nice to show a bit of my recording set up and the way I record a song. This video is really exactly what I did while making this song recreated as well as I could so it’s more of an honest video than my usual sort of thing.”

The EP is the follow up to his 2023 album, Fase Luna and 2020’s GENE. In 2016 Eastgate teamed up with New Zealand’s Connan Mockasin to form Soft Hair and release their self-titled debut. Eastgate was also formerly in Late of the Pier.

The new EP was written towards the tail-end of Eastgate’s time living in the Costa Rican jungle, which is where he wrote most of Fase Luna, and was recorded once he returned to society, to Wales. He recorded it in a studio in his garden shed.

“You cannot blend fusion with something else,” Eastgate says. “Fusion itself is the blending of realities. These are ideas I couldn’t have recorded in the jungle. Maybe they are metropolis songs. I took ideas written outside looking inward and finished them inside thinking outward.”

Read our 2015 interview with LA Priest.

La Fusion EP Tracklist:

1. Apple
2. City Warm Heart
3. Too Cool
4. Love 2 Know

LA Priest Tour Dates:

May 1 - Yard Club, Cologne, DE
May 2 - Cactus Café, Brugges, BE
May 4 - Bogen F, Zurich, CH
May 6 - La Maroquinerie, Paris, FR
May 7 – Bitterzoet, Amsterdam, NL
June 1 - White Hotel, Manchester, UK
June 2 - Future Yard, Birkenhead, UK
June 3 – Stereo, Glasgow, UK
June 5 – Patterns, Brighton, UK
June 6 - Studio 9294, London, UK
June 7 - Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, UK
June 8 - Strange Brew, Bristol, UK

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