Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the great leftist post-rock collective from Montreal, operate in the shadows. In the space between albums, you can never tell if or when they’re going to return. Today, we get the extremely welcome news that they are returning. In one month, the band will follow up their 2017 album “Luciferian Towers” with a new one called G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! This one will be spread across one 12″ LP and one 10″ record, and it’ll feature four tracks, two of which hover around the 20-minute mark.

In a statement, the band says that they wrote the album when they were still touring. (Godspeed toured heavily in 2019.) They recorded the album during quarantine, practicing social distancing in the studio. The Besnard Lakes’ Jace Lasek produced the album, and it’s first time working with Godspeed. The band will not share any early singles from the album in any conventional ways, but they will send early copies of a 10″ record to more than 100 independent record stores, and you can pre-order that record from one of those stores here. (Right now, that site is overloaded. Keep trying.) The band has also shared a minute-long preview, but it’s just a quiet drone, and it doesn’t really offer much sense of how the album might sound. Below, check out that video, the album’s slightly confusing tracklist, and the statement from the band.

TRACKLIST:
12A “A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) (4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz) / Job’s Lament / First of the Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY)” (20:22)
10A Fire at Static Valley” (5:58)
12B “‘GOVERNMENT CAME’ (9980.0kHz 3617.1kHz 4521.0 kHz) / Cliffs Gaze / cliffs’ gaze at empty waters’ rise / ASHES TO SEA or NEARER TO THEE” (19:48)
10B “OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (for D.H.)” (6:30)

Here’s the statement from the band:

we wrote it on the road mostly. when that was still a place.
and then recorded it in masks later, distanced at the beginning of the second wave.
it was autumn, and the falling sun was impossibly fat and orange.
we tried to summon a brighter reckoning there,
bent beneath varied states of discomfort, worry and wonderment.

we fired up the shortwave radios again, for the first time in a long time.
and found that many things had changed.
the apocalypse pastors were still there, but yelling END TIMES NOW where they once yelled “end times soon”.
and the transmission-detritus of automated militaries takes up more bandwidth now,
so that a lot of frequencies are just pulses of rising white static,
digital codexes announcing the status of various watching and killing machines.
and the ham-radio dads talk to each other all night long.
about their dying wives and what they ate for lunch and what they’ll do with their guns when antifa comes.

this record is about all of us waiting for the end.
all current forms of governance are failed.
this record is about all of us waiting for the beginning,
and is informed by the following demands=
empty the prisons
take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise.
end the forever wars and all other forms of imperialism.
tax the rich until they’re impoverished.

much love to all the other lost and lovely ones,
these are death-times and our side has to win.
we’ll see you on the road once the numbers fall.

xoxoxox god’s pee
montreal, quebec, kanada
1 march, 2021

G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! is out 4/2 on Constellation Records. Pre-order it here.