YACHT NEWS

Dystopia (The Earth is on Fire) by RADIO YACHT

[YACHT unveils their new upcoming album, Shangri-La!]

This is a free MP3 of Dystopia (The Earth is on Fire), the second song on our forthcoming album, “Shangri-La,” and the very first we’re sharing with you. We wrote this song in May of last year, around the time of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and after reading some post-apocalyptic science fiction. At the time, it seemed like the world was a train without brakes, hurtling towards an inescapable future. Now, in March of 2011, that sentiment seems easier and easier to believe, and Dystopia (The Earth is on Fire) is our post-apocalyptic fight song, a cautionary tale, a science-fiction story for our particular eco-socio-political landscape. We face a crisis of Utopia. And yes, maybe we have traded our birthright as partners in the world’s living mind for the broken promises of history, and that’s led us nowhere. But as tempting as it is to give into a horror of our crumbling, radiation-leaking, bomb-launching reality, where the tracks lead is ultimately up to us.

“Shangri-La” will be our second album for DFA Records, and fifth for the world. “Shangri-La” was produced, mixed, recorded, and performed by Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans with our frequent collaborator and touring member Bobby Birdman, at the Marfa Recording Company, Jackpot! Studios, and in our temporary living quarters in Los Angeles, California.

With “Shangri-La,” we assert that the future is a blank slate upon which anything can be imposed.

Paradise is kinetic potential, a latency within us that has been eaten alive by time. In line with the existing emphasis on self-empowerment in the YACHT philosophy, our idea of “Utopia” is personal. We believe that the only real sustainable paradise is in our minds, and hence creative output can be a tangible piece of the Utopia within each individual.

“Shangri-La” is literally YACHT’s Utopia, a place made of songs. We invite you to visit us there this summer.

-via Team YACHT