“This is Mogwai’s most thoroughly enjoyable release in a long time.” **** – The Music
“Every Country’s Sun is a beautiful place to spend an hour.” ALBUM OF THE WEEK – The Brag
“It’s anthemic, it’s titanium strong, and it’s exactly as powerful and career-defining as the band’s best work.” – Beat Magazine
“Brilliant music to navigate life’s chaos” **** The Guardian (AU Edition)
Mogwai’s ninth studio album, Every Country’s Sun is out now on Spunk Records/Caroline Australia in vinyl, CD and digital formats. The record is their first studio album since 2014’s Rave Tapes, and sees them reuniting with producer Dave Fridmann for the first time since 2001’s acclaimed ROCK ACTION LP; Fridmann also worked with the band on Come On Die Young (1999). It was recorded at Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, New York.

Every Country’s Sun takes two decades of Mogwai’s signature, contrasting sounds – towering intensity, pastoral introspection, synth-rock minimalism, DNA-detonating volume – and distills it, beautifully, into 56 concise minutes of gracious elegance, hymnal trance-rock, and transcenden- tal euphoria. It’s a structural soundscape built from stark foundations up; from a gentle, twinkling, synth-rock spectre to a solid, blown-out, skyward-thrusting obelisk. There’s percussive, dream-state electronics (Coolverine), church organs as chariots of existential fire (Brain Sweeties), tremulous, foreboding bleeping – possibly from a dying android (aka 47). Their most transportive album yet, it also hosts their most fully realised art-pop sing-along of their storied history, Party In The Dark, a head-spinning disco-dream double-helix echoing New Order and The Flaming Lips. This is music as a keep-out chrysalis, protective audio armour through exalting organs and portentous, dissonant guitar fuzz warping at the edges, bending the world inside-out into a reality in which you’d and their output numbers eight studio albums, 13 EPs, two remix albums, two live much rather live. The last three songs ascend into explosive exorcism, closing with
the colossal title track, its searching intensity whooshing towards infinity in a dazzling cosmic crescendo.
Mogwai – Dominic Aitchison (bass), Stuart Braithwaite (guitar, vocals), Martin Bulloch (drums) and Barry Burns (keyboard, computer, guitar) – formed in Glasgow in 1995, albums and four compilation albums including 2015’s collection Central Belters. They’ve also contributed soundtracks to an impressive spectrum of cinematic releases (both full soundtracks and contributions): alongside Atomic (a Top 20 UK album in 2016), there’s been consistent acclaim for projects including French TV series Les Revenants (2013) and contributions to Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate change documentary.