The Return of Darkside

A month or so ago, over on the blog’s Facebook page, I was lamenting the fact that we hadn’t seen or heard much of Darkside since the release of a fantastic debut album, Psychic, back in 2013. An album that claimed the highly coveted title (just go with it) of the everythingsgonegreen album of the year. It was later included on Pitchfork’s list of the “top of 100 albums of the decade (so far)” in 2014.

It’s fair to say it was a quite brilliant piece of work, but little did I know at the time of writing that particular social media post that Darkside were already plotting a return in 2021, with a new single/taster, ‘Liberty Bell’ (click here), released just days after I pressed “send”. I’m now rather more reliably informed we can expect a new album “in the spring”, which in southern hemisphere parlance means “in the autumn”, or more specifically, sometime in the early part of the year.

Darkside, of course, is a musical project of two multi-talented New York producers, Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington, and while both men have been active in releasing new music since Psychic received so much love and attention, especially the very prolific Jaar, this is the first sign of Darkside life we’ve seen, and a very welcome development.

In late 2020, possibly as a precursor to the new work, unbeknown to yours truly, the duo had also released a digital format only live version of Psychic over on their Bandcamp platform, a release which captures a rare live performance at Belgium’s Dour Festival in July of 2014. It’s a name-your-price release, and I reckon you’d be mad not to pick up a download, see below.