Zach Condon's veteran blog-rock project Beirut released their album Hadsel late in 2023, and he's getting ready to head out on the first Beirut tour in six years. (It's just a few European dates; don't get too excited.) Now, thanks to a Swedish circus, we're about to get another Beirut LP. Kompani Giraff commissioned the upcoming Beirut LP A Study Of Losses to soundtrack a show based on the German author Judith Schalansky's novel Verzeichnis Einiger Verluste. Circuses must be different in Europe. Barnum and Bailey didn't do anything quite like that.
A Study Of Losses is coming next month, and we already posted the singles "Caspian Tiger" and "Guericke’s Unicorn." Today, Beirut shares "Tuanaki Atoll," a gentle ukulele-driven folk number that gives me heavy Magnetic Fields flashbacks. Here's what Zach Condon says about it:
The Tuanaki Atoll is said to have been an Eden-like island somewhere in the South Pacific that mysteriously disappeared under the sea during an earthquake in the 1840s. Its inhabitants were described as a people so peaceful and generous that they had no word in their language for such things as war or murder. It might be almost too obvious of a choic,e but nothing could fit the island vibes better than a sweet and breezy ukulele, which became the foundation that I built this song around. Contrastingly yet somewhat fittingly, the lyrics took on a darker edge and ended up reflecting that side of the story. Maybe because personally I doubt that such an Eden-like place could ever exist on Earth.
Listen below.
A Study Of Losses is out 4/18 on Zach Condon's own Pompeii label.
