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!’”
On Michelangelo Dying, there is as much unsaid — or rather obscured — as explicitly stated: Le Bon’s rich, deeply textual arrangements built up in layers when she didn’t have the words, and didn’t want to find them. Musically, there is a continuation and expansion of a sound — a machine with a heart — that has taken shape over her last two records, 2019’s Reward and 2022’s Pompeii, as Le Bon has increasingly taken control of the playing and producing herself. As guitars and saxophones are pushed through pedals and percussion and voices are fed through filters, an iridescent, green and silky sound emerges, with flashes of the artistic singularities of David Bowie, Nico, John McGeoch and Laurie Anderson surfacing and disappearing below the waterline throughout.
While in recent years Le Bon has become a sought-after producer, applying a singular skill and sound to albums by the likes of Wilco, Horsegirl, Devendra Banhart and St. Vincent’s Grammy-winning All Born Screaming, the production of Michelangelo Dying was shared with collaborator Samur Khouja. Cate Le Bon explains, “There’s this idea that you could do everything yourself, but the value of having someone you completely trust, as I do Samur, be your co-pilot allows you to get completely lost knowing you’ll get pulled back in at the right moment. We have come to quietly move as one in the studio.”
To a similar end, her longstanding collaboration with saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood is a main thread of her sonic landscape. “Over the years of working together Euan has uncoupled his playing from the traditional to house the emotional frequency I have asked of him. On this record especially, it’s the voice that takes over when words are too concrete for the feeling.” He’s joined here by similarly close friends – Paul Jones on piano; Dylan Hadley on drums, and Valentina Magaletti on drums and percussion. And then there’s John Cale whose mindset of constantly moving forward and confronting life’s experiences through art while maintaining a fierce desire to keep his curiosity alive is a vivid inspiration to Le Bon. He makes a poignant appearance here on the mournful “Ride.”
An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener and artist, Michelangelo Dying knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, “No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos.”
Cate Le Bon also announces a late 2025 and early 2026 tour across Europe, the United Kingdom and North America. We previously covered Cate Le Bon all the way back in 2013.
