Zach Condon has announced that Beirut will be releasing their fourth studio album shortly. In a lengthy letter on the band’s website, Condon has detailed how the album came to be and what he’s been doing in the three years since their last studio album, No No No. The record will be titled Gallipoli, after the Italian town the band visited while recording and where Condon wrote the title track.
“We stumbled into a medieval-fortressed island town of Gallipoli one night and followed a brass band procession fronted by priests carrying a statue of the town’s saint through the winding narrow streets behind what seemed like the entire town, before returning late to Sudestudio," writes Condon. "The next day I wrote the song I ended up calling ‘Gallipoli’ entirely in one sitting, pausing only to eat. I eventually dragged Nick and Paul in to add some percussion and bass around midnight after a trance-like ten hours of writing and playing. I was quite pleased with the result. It felt to me like a cathartic mix of all the old and new records and seemed to return me to the old joys of music as a visceral experience. This seemed to be the guiding logic behind much of the album, of which I only realized fully at that point.”
Read Condon's full letter here and listen to Beirut live on KEXP in Chicago in 2007, right before the release of their sophomore album The Flying Cup, here.
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