The New Pornographers have announced their eighth studio album, In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights, and shared its first single, titled “Falling Down the Stairs of Your Smile.” The song lays out what sounds like a New Pornos take on the “Billie Jean” groove at the beginning, and foregrounds the band’s characteristic blend of A.C. “Carl” Newman and Neko Case of dual lead vocals. In the Morse Code of Brake Lights is due out on September 27 on the band’s own label Collected Work.
In a statement about the album given to Pitchfork, Newman commented that he noticed while writing the record that “lyrically so much of it was pointing toward car songs.” He wrote: “There was so much of that throughout it that I started thinking: ‘Oh, no, there’s too many references to cars on this record!’ And then I thought, ‘No, that’s good—people might think it’s a concept album.’” About “Falling Down the Stairs of Your Smile,” he commented:
There are so many songs like ‘the something of love’—you know, there’s ‘The Book of Love,’ ‘The Freeway of Love’…. Then I thought of ‘falling down the stairs of your love,’ and I thought, that kind of works. I think it has that element of how do you deal with the ideas of love and happiness in this world right now? When current events are stressful, that makes a stress on people’s relationships, and you’re trying to figure out how to be happy in this loving relationship in this world that seems ugly at every turn.
The last New Pornographers album was 2017’s Whiteout Conditions. Listen to “Falling Down the Stairs of Your Smile” below, and pre-order In the Morse Code of Brake Lights here.
https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/40TqJBUPjk9o7DWp1KmhCR
https://embed.music.apple.com/us/album/falling-down-the-stairs-of-your-smile/1473992637?i=1473992647&app=music
