Out now: Lambchop’s much-anticipated new album, The Bible. Get your copy on CD or etched 2-LP (available on both limited-edition yellow & black marble Peak Vinyl or standard black) in the Merge store and participating independent record stores. In addition, Grimey’s in Nashville and Electric Fetus in Minneapolis are carrying an exclusive signed vinyl pressing on “smog” (gray & white marble).

To mark the occasion, Kurt Wagner is making his contribution to slow television with the new Lambchop lyric video for “Daisy” which features the most unusual yule log. 

Wagner on “Daisy”:

This track was created entirely from parts of twelve 20-minute improv sessions that co-producer Andrew Broder sent me prior to going up to Minneapolis. It represents the original idea I had for a start to making this record. I edited the improvs into this form and wrote and sang the words based on the remembrance of HAL 9000, the computer singing the song “Daisy Bell” while he was being unplugged in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It stands as one of the earliest examples of voice processing in contemporary media. Co-producer Ryan Olson added the “Hey” sample which is one of his signature moves from his vast production arsenal. It snaps you out of the moment enough to transcend the maudlin.

Last weekend at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Wagner completely overhauled the Lambchop live experience from (most recently) a 6-piece band into a 16-piece ensemble, performing selections from The Bible and last year’s Showtunes. Get a shot of KnOMO (Knowledge Of Missing Out) via Erik Westra’s photography on Lambchop’s Instagram.

And so it was that Wagner found himself in Minneapolis in the sweltering summer of 2021, in a decommissioned paint factory turned practice space, when everybody was still kind of looking at everybody else as a potential source of disease. He entrusted himself to piano player Andrew Broder and his mad genius of a production partner, Ryan Olson. “Ryan and Andrew, they’re like two sides of my personality,” Wagner says. “And if you put them together as a team, they represent me.” This would be the first time Wagner let somebody else—not to mention somebody else without any sort of a connection to holy, old Nashville—produce a Lambchop record. 

It was in that decommissioned paint factory in Minneapolis, watching a bunch of burnout freaks play their instruments, that Wagner found his way to writing The Bible. The sessions reminded him of those long-ago days at the Springwater Supper Club in Nashville, when he first brought the afterparty back to his house. But maybe because he wasn’t the one making the afterparty rules this time, the music on The Bible is more unpredictable than it’s ever been on a Lambchop record. Jazz careening into country, into disco, into funk, and back to country. This is Lambchop’s new album—born in a new place, but out of a process that he first discovered back home in Nashville, the one that helped him find his own voice in the first place. Amen. This is The Bible.

Lambchop will perform as the duo of Wagner and Broder at the annual Psychic Hotline Block Party on October 15 in Carrboro, NC.

Critical acclaim: 

“There is at least a glimpse here of most everything Lambchop has done before, but ripped apart and reoriented within the context of what else is possible now.” —NPR

“Recorded during the throes of the pandemic in a new location, Minneapolis, instead of Wagner’s home base of Nashville, it’s a celebration of expertly arranged chaos with a new collaborator in producer and pianist Andrew Broder and co-producer Ryan Olson.” —Aquarium Drunkard

“it’s the work of a focused artist who is consistently attempting to stretch out the parameters of their own ever-expanding sonic world.” —9/10 Uncut

“Lambchop’s most eclectic album to date – an anything-goes explosion of creativity that rewards repeated listening… Another late-career gem.” 
—★★★★ Record Collector