What’s Beirut been up to in the three years since their last album NoNoNo was released? The band’s frontman, Zach Condon, tells all in a new letter posted to the group’s official website. The letter chronicles everything from Condon’s attachment to an organ he acquired at his first job to the artist’s back and forth from Berlin to New York City, but here’s the key information: a new Beirut album is forthcoming. The album, titled Gallipoli, gets its name from the Italian town Condon, bandmates Nick Petree and Paul Collins ,and Gabe Wax (the producer of their last album) visited while finishing the last stretch of recording. Condon said he was so inspired by the trip, during which he and the others followed a brass band procession led by priests carrying a statue of the town’s saint, that the next day he wrote a song called “Gallipoli” in one sitting. “It felt to me like a cathartic mix of all the new and old records and seemed to me the old joys of music as a visceral experience,” he wrote. “This seemed to be the guiding logic behind much of the album, of which I only realized fully at that point.”
Gallipoli will be Beirut’s fourth studio album. Stay tuned for more information.
