Mike Skinner dropped his new album preview on MySpace earlier this month, and it contained some promising bits including some of this, “The Escapist.” Like One Day As A Lion, turns out the new track is a warning delivered and a promise kept: Mike flows along to some backing choir choruses, and true to track and artist title, Skinner steals away from the city scene via lots and lots of winding pathways paved with tar and cement that cars and trucks use, otherwise known as, yep you guessed it: roads.
Man this new The Roads song is the jam. The press release says Mike actually walked all that way to France, which knowing what I know of him I don’t doubt in the slightest. Download the track by submitting a fake email here. It comes from Everything Is Borrowed, which is out in the UK on 9/15 via 679 and sometime thereafter in the US via Vice.
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Fantastic song
This beat is unreal. This reminds me of something from ’97 for some reason….
absolutely love it.
the beat is amazing. Mike is a man that knows his way around a hook.
The beat is actually a variation on the intro beat to Protection by Massive Attack. It’s the preset you get when you open up Logic’s ultrabeat sequencer and pull up the trip hop remix kit. No, seriously…
This sounds ok to me, but it’s like he keeps trying to re-write dry your eyes with each album. The singing is more in tune this time on the chorus’ thank god. That’s the reason I don’t listen to his last record. Hopefully he is back to writing about things everyone can relate to this album, as being a populist writer was what made him interesting to me.
wow! consider me fucking pumped! hopefully this is album is as good as this song.
Dare I get my hopes up? Skinner is the epitome of the “Great First Record, OK Second Record, Bad Third Record” Syndrome. If there’s a “Let’s Push Things Forward” or an “All Got Our Runnins” (a guy can dream, right?) on the new one, he could be the rare act that can reverse The Syndrome.
The backing tracks remind me a lot of Groove Armada’s “At the River.” Is anyone else hearing this?
Skinner has gone full circle, we feel in love with his boyish charm about pizza and clubs yet those days have gone, hes moves on to real life and love. But then maybe as we all get older we do to. This and everything is borrowed take his lyrics to a new level, alomst shakespear.
Who is the guy at the end of the video who warms up beside Mike “at the end of his journey”? Is Mike no longer being “the escaper”, finally fessing up, and coming out of the closet now? The world needs a shit hott gay english bloke.