Gruff Rhys Previews New Album With ‘Loan Your Loneliness’

Gruff Rhys has shared the video for “Loan Your Loneliness,” off the Super Furry Animals singer’s upcoming new solo album Seeking New Gods.

The album, out May 21st via Rough Trade, is inspired by an imagined history of the picturesque Mount Paektu, an active volcano on the border of North Korea and China.

“The album is about people and the civilizations, and the spaces people inhabit over periods of time,” Rhys said in a statement. “How people come and go but the geology sticks around and changes more slowly. I think it’s about memory and time. It’s still a biography of a mountain, but now it’s a Mount Paektu of the mind. You won’t learn much about the real mountain from listening to this record but you will feel something, hopefully.”

In the video for “Loan Your Loneliness,” — directed by Rhys’ longtime collaborator Mark James — Rhys, double-necked guitar in hand, and his masked backing band play the single in front of a backdrop of the mountain, with creatures from black-and-white monster movies of yore groove along to the music. As the synth solos build, the video transforms from black-and-white to Technicolor.

Seeking New Gods, available to preorder, now marks Rhys’ seventh solo album and first since 2019’s Pang!, a collaboration with South African producer Muzi. The upcoming LP was recorded following Rhys’ pre-Covid U.S. tour and mixed by Beastie Boys collaborator Mario C., who previously mixed Super Furry Animals’ Phantom Power!, Lovekraft and a pair of Rhys solo albums.

Seeking New Gods Track List

1. Mausoleum Of My Former Self
2. Can’t Carry On
3. Loan Your Loneliness
4. Seeking New Gods
5. Hiking In Lightning
6. Holiest Of The Holy Men
7. The Keep
8. Everlasting Joy
9. Distant Snowy Peaks