Cate Le Bon announces her seventh album, Michelangelo Dying, out September 26th via Mexican Summer, and releases the lead single/video, “Heaven Is No Feeling.” Michelangelo Dying’s creation was led by pure emotion, usurping the album Le Bon thought she was making. The product of all-consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album about love, and in the process became a kind of exorcism. What emerges is a wonderfully iridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up — but which in doing so, picks at it too.
Michelangelo Dying was made between the Grecian island Hydra, Cardiff, London, and Los Angeles, and ultimately finished in the Californian desert, where much of the record’s landscape and heartache exists in Le Bon’s mind. It’s a record centered on the many states of existence within love and its aftermath as Le Bon found herself surrendering to the abstraction of intense feeling and the grieving of a fantasy, apparent on today’s single, “Heaven Is No Feeling.” Le Bon sings: “I see you watch me work for your slow hand / Draping my body with no rhythm just desire / The day / The night / It all ends / And you smoke our love / Like you’ve never known violence.”
The song’s accompanying video was directed by H. Hawkline who comments, “There are moments in life you can’t make up, that seem unfathomable, then they happen. Life calls you on a banana phone and tells you her oldest joke, everybody crowds around and you try to remember the words to your favourite song. If you were to ask me how we made this video, I couldn’t tell you. Cate watching her, watching her watching Cate. I will always feel honoured to work with Cate in whatever shape or form, it’s easy to forget how remarkable someone is when you’ve known them forever. ‘I want you to make me a new video.’ ‘Have you watched the old one yet?’ ‘No’ …Bravo!’”
Paper Phoenix ink 