Cabaret Voltaire are back with their new album Shadow Of Fear, out 20 November 2020
Cabaret Voltaire have announced the first new album in 26 years, with Shadow Of Fear set for release on Mute Records on 20 November. This is Cabaret Voltaire’s first release with Richard H Kirk as the sole member of the band, and the result is genre-defying voyage through the history of electronic music.
Cabaret Voltaire has always been a group ahead of their time, and this album is part of their continuing evolution.
“The album was finished just as all the weirdness was starting to kick in,” Kirk says. “Shadow Of Fear feels like a strangely appropriate title. The current situation didn’t have much of an influence on what I was doing – all the vocal content was already in place before the panic set in – but maybe due to my nature of being a bit paranoid there are hints in there about stuff going a bit weird and capturing the current state of affairs.” Although, as with a lot of Kirk’s work, concrete meaning and narrative is ripe for interpretation rather than being spelled out. “Surrealism has always been really important to Cabaret Voltaire,” he says. “And that’s still present too.”
Work on the new album began as a result of Kirk’s first solo Cabaret Voltaire show at the Berlin Atonal festival in 2014. Determined to break away from nostalgia, he set out to create a ’21st century record’, to which ‘normal rules do not apply’.
Kirk has since gone on to perform at festivals and concerts across Europe, shaping the sound of Cabaret Voltaire’s future. “I started developing tracks specifically for live performance,” he says. “Stuff that was quite stripped back and crude. Every time I would visit a new place to perform, I would write something fresh.”
Recorded at the latest location of Western Works, the studio used throughout Cabaret Voltaire’s history, Kirk toyed with upgrading his old set up to digital but after a computer failure he decided to retain his original equipment. “Making this album reminded me a bit of the old days with Cabaret Voltaire because there wasn’t that much equipment, so you really had to use your imagination.”
Listen to Vasto, the first taste of what to expect from the new album, here.
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