Hear a Sample of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Upcoming Epic — rollingstone.com

Crescendo architects Godspeed You! Black Emperor will return with a new album, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, next month. The record, which "clocks in at a succinct 40:23," according to the band's label, contains four new, sure-to-be overwhelming compositions that the band recorded in 2013 and 2014 in North Carolina and Montreal. The label reports that the album's two middle songs, "Lambs' Breath" and "Asunder, Sweet," are drone works, while the final tune, the 14-minute "Piss Crowns are Trebled," contains a series of the band's signature crescendos. To accompany the album announcement, the band offered an eight-minute snippet of lead track "Peasantry or 'Light! Inside of Light!'" Beginning with brassy, neo-classical guitar trumpeting and atonal violin screeches, the sample congeals into a folky, art-rock fusion of guitar fuzz, reedy-sounding strings and vaguely Middle Eastern melodies before fading out.

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