Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds has dropped a new single, “Dead to the World,” along with a lyric video for the track. The song will appear on the rock band’s fourth studio album, Council Skies, out June 2 via Sour Mash Records.
In a statement, Gallagher confirmed that “Dead To The World” is “by some distance my favorite tune on the album. It has this film noir vibe. It’s not like anything else I’ve ever done before. It’s very melancholic, but I like that. I’m a Gemini – I’m as up as I am down, and the trick is to meet somewhere in the middle and turn that into music.”
The song is one of several on the LP to feature strings arranged by Rosie Danvers, a long-time High Flying Birds collaborator.
“Rosie gets what I do,” Gallagher noted. ‘Spending a weekend recording strings in Abbey Road – that’s one of the great privileges in a musician’s life. It sounds majestic.”
Previously, the band unveiled two tracks off the album: “Easy Now” and “Pretty Boy.” Council Skies, named after a book by illustrator and Noel’s friend Pete McKee, finds Gallagher reminiscing about his adolescence in Manchester before he and his brother and their band moved to London and hit it big at the dawn of the Britpop era.
“It’s going back to the beginning,” Gallagher said of the album in a statement. “Daydreaming, looking up at the sky and wondering about what life could be… that’s as true to me now as it was in the early ‘90s. When I was growing up in poverty and unemployment, music took me out of that.”
The album, recorded at Noel’s own Lone Star Sound Recording Studio in London, was produced by Gallagher and Paul “Strangeboy” Stacey and features orchestration laid down at the famed Abbey Road Studios. Johnny Marr appears on three tracks over the course of Council Skies, including “Pretty Boy.”
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds will tour in support of the album this summer. The North American dates will kick off on June 2 in Auburn, WA at White River Amphitheatre and continue through July 15 with a show in Boston at MGM Music Hall at Fenway. Metric is set to open the majority of the dates.
