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Wild Beasts have announced their new album Boy King. Their most direct and vital collection to date, the album is set for release on 5^th August 2016 with its first single ‘Get My Bang’ also released today. The video for ‘Get My Bang’ was shot in Belgrade and directed by Olivier Groulx (Arcade Fire, alt-J, Scott Walker) featuring vocalist Hayden Thorpe’s twisted routine of Justin Timberlake-meets-Trent Reznor choreography.

Where 2014’s Present Tense album found Wild Beasts in reflective mood, absorbing a fascination with online culture and electronic music, Boy King has them, as Tom Fleming puts it, “back to being pissed off”. The quartet’s ever-present knack for sensual melody via Hayden Thorpe and Fleming’s dueting vocals, Ben Little’s sinuous guitar groove and Chris Talbot’s potent rhythm section carries in Boy King an aggressive, snarling and priapic beast that delves into the darker side of masculinity and Thorpe’s own psyche. As Hayden himself says, “After five records there had to be an element of ‘what the fuck?'”.

A newfound creative friction between Thorpe and Fleming proved key to unleashing the unique pop sensibility of Boy King –Fleming’s more visceral experimentation unlocking new dimensions in Thorpe’s own writing. After spending a whole year finessing this new found impetus in East London, the band emerged with a collection of songs ready to take to Dallas and producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Swans, The War on Drugs). Both Thorpe and Fleming credit that trip to Dallas with teasing out the raw power of Boy King. In the studio, the band kept up the intensity of the office hour routine they’d employed during writing sessions and, they say, responded well to Congleton’s sober discipline. “He made us get in there, get on and do it,” Fleming says. “English politeness never featured.”

The raw pop of Boy King‘s songs are the perfect foil to Thorpe’s libidinous lyricism: “it became apparent that that guitar almost became the character within the songs, that phallic character, the all-conquering male,” he says. “I’m letting my inner Byron fully out, I thought I’d tucked him away, but he came screaming back like the Incredible Hulk.” Here lies Boy King‘s greatest success. Between the slide of prowling aggression and interior darkness, there are glorious, gorgeous moments. It’s yet another incomparable Wild Beasts record; a visceral, sensual and jolting body of work that acts as a remarkable soundtrack to the early 21st century male malaise. Or as Thorpe puts it: “I think Boy King is an apocalyptic record. It’s about swimming in the abyss. When you think about sex, you’ve got to think about death, they’re one and the same.

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Mauro Remiddi once ran away to join the circus. The circus was in Berlin and Mauro was 21 years old and at the time he was a street musician earning his living in Florence. Traveling with the circus he played accordion and percussion and violin while acrobats flew above the stage and magicians plied their tricks for the crowd.

Soon after this he found himself in North Korea, a visiting musical ambassador for Italy somehow shaking hands with Kim Jong-un in a display of state-orchestrated propaganda, an experience that drastically reconfigured his outlook for the rest of his life. Mauro remembers the astonishment of the people he encountered, none of whom had ever seen a Western face before.

To be a stranger in a strange land has been a recurrent theme across his career.

Born in Rome, his three decades as a journeyman musician have taken him from London to New York and now his new home of Los Angeles. His new EP as Porcelain Raft, Half Awake, was written and recorded in Greenpoint, mixed by Chris Coady at the legendary Sunset Sounds in Los Angeles and mastered by Heba Kadry. Half Awake will be available on Volcanic Field, Remiddi’s own new boutique art label.

Volcanic Field hails a new chapter for Remiddi ‘I felt the need to create a house for all my music and ideas. A sort of archive, a diary of my work in progress, for the sake to tell the story and tell it all.’

It’s about the different way we explore new sounds and how the format influences our perception of it. It’s about how to return to listening to music in a slow, deliberate and appreciative act and how he might prevent his work from being lost in the stream. Where algorithms make our choices for us and the act of accumulating music for its own sake is a compulsion that most of us don’t think about, not realizing our loss of agency in choosing what to pay attention to; to really listen.

Half Awake will be released digitally and physically on cassette. The limited edition cassettes come with a run of linoleum prints, each hand printed in Remiddi’s home studio in LA.

The format choice for this EP comes from a long-held reverence for the sound of cassette tapes. Remiddi made his first music as a teenager on a four track and continues to enjoy the aural textures of the medium, its sound is a comfort of sorts, like a constant.

The songs on Half Awake are about letting go; of places and of expectations. The EP came into being at a juncture when Remiddi relocated from New York to Los Angeles, and explores a compassionate breaking with past selves and the places they’ve lived. Familiar androgynous vocals glide beneath dreamy keyboard washes and infinitely recurring guitars chime above a protagonist who has “Something after me, whatever is after me, I don’t want to touch the ground.”

Half Awake is out through Volcanic Field on June 2nd.