Photo Credit: Kelsey Hunter Ayres
The Gaslight Anthem have released their first album in nearly a decade today on their own Rich Mahogany Recordings label via Thirty Tigers. HISTORY BOOKS was produced by GRAMMY® Award-winner Peter Katis (The National, Kurt Vile) at his Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, CT, and includes “Spider Bites” with a new Kelsey Hunter-Ayers-directed video premiering on YouTube today.
The album also includes such recently released singles as “Autumn” and “Little Fires,” featuring guest vocals from PUP frontman Stefan Babcock and joined by an official music video directed by photographer/filmmaker Kelsey Hunter Ayres. Further highlights include “Positive Charge,” and the heavy-hearted title track, “History Books,” the latter of which sees frontman Brian Fallon trading duet vocals with longtime band champion and fellow New Jerseyan Bruce Springsteen. An official music video, directed by Ayres, is streaming now on YouTube. “History Books” was met with immediate acclaim from such outlets as the Associated Press, which declared it “big-hearted freeway rock, made ascendant by frontman Brian Fallon and Springsteen’s tremulous harmonies.”
STREAM/PURCHASE HISTORY BOOKS
WATCH “SPIDER BITES” OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO
WATCH “HISTORY BOOKS” OFFICIAL VIDEO
WATCH “LITTLE FIRES” OFFICIAL VIDEO
The Gaslight Anthem have been on the road marking HISTORY BOOKS and their recent return to action with North American headline dates, highlighted by an instantly sold-out series of intimate record release shows at Jersey City’s historic White Eagle Hall starting tonight and going through Monday, October 30. In addition, the band will headline WFUV’s annual “Holiday Cheer for WFUV” benefit event, set for December 6 at New York City’s renowned Beacon Theatre. Pre-sales are available now through Thursday, October 5 at 10:00 pm ET (Password: WFUVCHEER). General on-sales begin Friday, October 6 at 11:00 am ET. The band will also perform in Chicago on December 8th as part of Q101’s Twisted Xmas concert series.
The band also recently unveiled an eagerly anticipated EU/UK tour, making stops in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, and the United Kingdom through March 2024. Additional UK dates follow in July. For full details and ticket availability, please see www.thegaslightanthem.com. The Gaslight Anthem will be performing the single “History Books” on CBS Saturday Morning tomorrow.
Acclaimed author Hanif Abdurraqib recently wrote the essay below about History Books:
There’s no good answer to the question of remaining in a place where you have both affection and tenure. When people ask me why I am still in Columbus, Ohio, after an entire life there, there’s nothing satisfying I can tell them if they are imagining that I could, or should exist in some other universe. But the easiest and best answer is this: when I’ve been away for a while, I like to come back and see familiar faces, who know me enough to tell me the good word. The things I’ve missed. I like people who talk to me like we are having a conversation already in progress. One that started in some other timeline and then just picked right back up where it left off, no matter how long it has been.
It is a good time for the Gaslight Anthem to return to us, and to return to us as if they were barely ever gone. I will tell anyone who will listen (which, by my count, is far too many people) that time feels especially steeped in illusions of pace. The days seem slow, but the months speed by. It is sometimes hard to pull apart the distance between my present self, and the younger self, who once drove through the night to get to Jersey just in time to stand in line for tickets to a Gaslight Anthem show, and I’m not necessarily sure I’d absolutely need to pull the two apart if not for the realities of age, of time, of grief. It is good to hear a band that isn’t afraid to grow older. Maybe even better to have a band who, in their songs, seem somewhat joyfully bewildered by the dilemma of ongoing survival. Which, to be clear, is a bewildering one.
A blessing, then, to receive History Books. Which is, to my ear, my mind, my heart, an album swelling with a kind of somber gratitude. One that is not entirely divorced from the existing Gaslight Anthem oeuvre, but the tunes overflow with tenderness. “Autumn” is a love song for lovers who sometimes think of a future without the person they love in it, the lovers who sometimes can’t detach their present affections from the relentless and cruel passage of hours. “Empires” sounds cynical at first, its speaker hardened by the world, but peel back a light layer, and it’s simply someone eager for a softer, more merciful march through their time here. “Little Fires” has its foot on the accelerator, as one might expect from the band when they are at their most eager, but its pace collides with its catchy hook which collides with the exuberant nature of its lyrics. The vast terrain covered on this album allows for all corners of living, of aging. The complex corners, the existential corners, the corners filled with small, propulsive pleasures.
But more than that, it all feels comfortable and familiar. Like you’ve been away from home for a long time, and you’ve come back to not just one familiar face, but a whole choir of them. All of them want to tell you the good word of what has transpired since you’ve been away from each other. Someone’s a little older. Someone fell in love, and then out of love, but wouldn’t you know it, they fell in love again. Someone died, but more of us are still here. This album feels like ten different homecomings in one. All of them delivering the best news.
The Gaslight Anthem is: Brian Fallon (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Alex Rosamilia (lead guitar, backing vocals), Alex Levine (bass guitar, backing vocals), and Benny Horowitz (drums, percussion, backing vocals).
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