The Chemical Brothers - For That Beautiful Feeling

 

180-gram 45 RPM triple LP

Rigid slipcase w/ foil detailing, plus poster

Glossy full-color inner sleeves

First new studio album in four years!

Nearly 35 years have passed since Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons first met at the University of Manchester — and it's taken that long for them to be willing look back on their work as electronic duo The Chemical Brothers.

With the exception of a few tours circa 2015, when Ed Simons went on leave to go back to college, The Chemical Brothers never split up. For the duo's 10th studio LP, For That Beautiful Feeling — just as they have since the release of their groundbreaking 1995 debut Exit Planet Dust — they paired down a glut of music, mostly made during the pandemic, and just let their moods dictate.

"We always want our music to not be a technical exercise, but to reflect how the two of us are feeling," Simons says. "And I guess, you know, it has been a very strange four years."

He's not wrong, writes Billboard. Much has gone down on a global scale since the Brothers released their last album, 2019's No Geography. The world went into lockdown a few weeks after the LP won dance/electronic album of the year at the 2020 Grammys. Amid the pandemic, Rowlands tucked himself away in his Sussex studio and started banging out music, which Simons picked up when it was safe to do so. "It was the longest period we've spent apart for a while," Simons says of that time.

As COVID eventually waned, the war in Ukraine began, living costs spiraled in the U.K. and elsewhere and the climate crisis became increasingly tangible and exponentially scarier. It was, is, a lot of psychic weight for them, and for everyone else. But there were, of course, moments of daily joy. That, altogether, was their mood, and thus that is the album.

For That Beautiful Feeling catapults from ecstasy to dread ("we have no reason to live!" declares track two, "No Reason"), to sadness, to a sort of hectic waking dream state, to hope, to the transcendent title track that closes the LP. In total, the project reflects the anxieties and exhilarations of life on earth in 2023 through the same sort of tightly wound, acid-soaked, elegant, raucous, rock-ish, blissful and often subversive style that's defined their discography.

Intro

Live Again (FEAT. HALO MAUD)

No Reason

Goodbye

Fountains

Magic Wand 2

The Weight

Skipping Like a Stone (FEAT. BECK)

The Darkness That You Fear (HARVEST MIX)

Feels Like I Am Dreaming

For That Beautiful Feeling

For That Beautiful Feeling (FEAT. HALO MAUD)

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