Some good news on the music scene as Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee’s Debut Album: “Los Angeles” is finally going to see the light of day.  The first single, features James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) and is titled, “Los Angeles.”

If the names spark some memory of days gone by, it’s with good reason.  Lol Tolhurst was the drummer for The Cure until 1989 and Budgie was the drummer for of Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Creatures.  They joined forces with Jacknife Lee who is an Irish music producer and mixer who has collaborated with a rather impressive, to say the very least, variety of artists, including The Cars, U2, R.E.M., the Killers, Snow Patrol, Bloc Party, the Hives, Weezer, One Direction, Silversun Pickups, Editors, Modest Mouse, and Taylor Swift.

“Los Angeles” is available for preorder and will drop on November 3, 2023.  Here is more info along with links to preorder the album/ CD.

Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee are pleased to share their debut album Los Angeles due out November 3.  The hard-hitting 13 tracks on the album dive into freedom and slavery, beauty and decay, hope and despair, and feature an astonishing list of guest vocalists and musicians including The Edge (U2), Isaac Brock (Modest Mouse), Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream), Civil Rights avant-garde artist Lonnie Holley, Mary Lattimore, Starcrawler wild child Arrow de Wilde, Mark Bowen (IDLES) and more.

VINYL – 2X LP Standard black 2LP with Side D etching. Housed in a single sleeve, with printed inner sleeves and printed on-body labels.

PREORDER HERE

The three-way Los Angeles collaborative long-player was born out of a curiosity which just wouldn’t die. Made up of two of the most illustrious and inventive drummers of the post-punk era, The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst and Budgie from Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Creatures, along with stellar producer and multi-instrumentalist Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, this unlikely alt-supergroup have spent the last four years spiriting up one of the most extraordinary albums to appear in 2023. 

CD
House in a 4-panel digisleeve, CD wallet, 8pp fold out poster and printed on-body

PREORDER HERE

Perusing the track list with its guest credits, you may rightly wonder just what the 13- track long-player holds in store. The answer: a hard-hitting and compulsively exploratory 55-minute electronic head-fuck, founded on unrivaled rhythmic expertise, fleshed out with an armory of synths, guitars (Jacknife’s forté) and supplementary percussion, often overlaid with elite-class strings and brass, then universally twisted, manipulated and quite masterfully sculpted by Lee, with his super-producer’s hat on. 

2X LP + CD Bundle

PREORDER HERE

As per the title, Los Angeles is a journey into the dark heart of contemporary LaLaLand, the city of its birth, a place of limitless possibility, yet also a diseased and consumptive hell-on-earth which, to quote Murphy’s lyric on the title track, “eats its children”, where pipe dreams shatter, racial inequality prevails and homelessness spirals. Throw in the terrifying uncertainty occasioned by the global pandemic, which both interrupted and ultimately aided its genesis, and the ‘new Cold War’ terror that has ensued, and you get a record fueled by fear and tension, but whose propulsive beats, mind warping, mangled instrumentation and exceptional vocal contributions provide release through the palpable joy of their creation. Far-sighted and visionary, it lands just in time for those Album of the Year polls. 

Tracklist: Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee, “Los Angeles”

1. “This Is What It Is (To Be Free)” (with Bobby Gillespie)
2. “Los Angeles” (with James Murphy)
3. “Uh Oh” (with Arrow de Wilde and Mark Bowen)
4. “Ghosted At Home” (with Bobby Gillespie)
5. “Train With No Station” (with The Edge)
6. “Bodies” (with Lonnie Holley and Mary Lattimore)
7. “Everything And Nothing”
8. “Travel Channel” (with Pan Amsterdam)
9. “Country Of The Blind” (with Bobby Gillespie)
10. “The Past (Being Eaten)”
11. “We Got To Move” (with Isaac Brock)
12. “Noche Oscura” (with The Edge)
13. “Skins” (with James Murphy)