Texas favorites Spoon are in the midst of one of the longest between-album gaps of their career: Hot Thoughts came out in early 2017, making it well over four years old now. Well, the drought is about to end: The band’s tenth album, Lucifer On The Sofa, is set for release on February 11, 2022. Alongside that announcement, the band shared the single “The Hardest Cut,” a pure rocker driven by a forward-moving and upbeat riff.
The band’s Britt Daniel told NME of the song:
“‘The Hardest Cut’ was the first song that Alex [Fischel, keys and guitar] and I wrote when we moved back to Texas to work on this album. He had some chords and then I came up with this sort of drop D riff that we called ‘the Texas riff,’ because that’s what it sounded like to us. We called the song ‘Texas Riff’ for a while, until I got some words to it. I always wanted to have a Spoon song that had the vibe of ‘Run Run Run’ by The Who. So it was the combination of three things; Alex’s chords, my riff, and ‘Run Run Run.’ And then we had it — ‘The Hardest Cut.’”
He also said of the album more broadly, “It’s a record we decided we wanted to make when we were touring the last one. We toured Hot Thoughts longer and with more shows than any other album we’ve ever done, which is saying a lot. While we were out there, we kept discovering that we were playing the songs from the last album better on the road than they were on the record. So the idea was to take that energy that you get from playing songs live and being on the road and hashing out the songs, using that energy first. So you’re not starting with a demo and building on it; you’re actually getting in a room and experiencing that sound together and working from there. You’re not figuring out the song as you record it: You figure it out, then you record it. That was a big part of it. […] It’s just fun — a record for some good times.”
Watch the “The Hardest Cut” video above and find the Lucifer On The Sofa art and tracklist below.
1. “Held”
2. “The Hardest Cut”
3. “The Devil & Mister Jones”
4. “Wild”
5. “My Babe”
6. “Feels Alright”
7. “On The Radio”
8. “Astral Jacket”
9. “Satellite”
10. “Lucifer On The Sofa”
Lucifer On The Sofa is out 2/11/2022 via Matador Records. Pre-order it here.