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Nov 16, 2015 Discovery By Christopher Roberts

Brooklyn’s Ra Ra Riot have announced their new album and shared its first single, “Water,” which features Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij. Need Your Light is the band’s fourth album, the follow-up to 2013’s Beta Love, and is due out February 19, 2016 via Barsuk. Below is the tracklist, album art, and “Water” (via its lyric video).

Need Your Light was mainly produced by Ryan Hadlock, but features production on two songs (“I Need Your Light” and “Water”) by Batmanglij, who has been a supporter of the band since its early days and who had a side-project, Discovery, with Ra Ra Riot vocalist Wes Miles. Batmanglij commented on the album in a press release, saying:

“Between 2005-2009, Wes and I wrote an album together in snatched moments in our lives… That record (the Discovery LP) seemed to benefit from us having the freedom to pick it up and put it down. In January of this year, Wes came to stay with me, and we set out to write songs again. We didn’t know where it would take us. There was something I’d heard in Wes’s singing in the earliest days of seeing Ra Ra Riot live that I felt had never quite been captured on record. There was our shared love of U2’s Achtung Baby, something that having listened to the music we’ve recorded in our lives thus far you might not know about. And also this obsession with writing songs that tell stories. So we spent five days writing just two songs - ‘Water’ and ‘I Need Your Light’ - and I think we found that same freedom in making these songs that we had found years ago making the Discovery record, not knowing where it would take us.”

The full current Ra Ra Riot lineup is as follows: Wes Miles (vocals), Mathieu Santos (bass), Milo Bonacci (guitar), Rebecca Zeller (violin), and Kenny Bernard (drums). The press release sums up Need Your Light as such: “The result is an album that’s celebratory without being solipsistic and that sees the group collectively mining their prior experiences in order to craft something that looks toward the future with an optimistic gaze.”

Need Your Light Tracklist:

1. Water
2. Absolutely
3. Foreign Lovers
4. I Need Your Light
5. Bad Times
6. Call Me Out
7. Instant Breakup
8. Every Time I’m Ready To Hug
9. Bouncy Castle
10. Suckers