"What You Want Is Gone" ~ Single & Video

Single 3 from QUALIFYING MILES 💿

Happy Wednesday, to those who celebrate! Today single number 3 from our upcoming album Qualifying Miles (out July 18th) is released into the world, and analysts are already calling it “a doozie” — in some cases “a right womp” (‘whomp’?).

“What You Want Is Gone” comes fully equipped with an epic lead guitar line, a mournful verse, and a massive, harmony-laden chorus that should induce feelings of overflowing nostalgia even in young children and recently-released AIs. We will be shocked if you don’t find yourself at least HUMMING along to this chorus after hearing it once or twice, and the belters among you will enjoy opening up those lungs and really letting it fly.

There’s also a big video. We assembled this lumbering (yet approachable) beast during the first two weeks of our recent EU tour, and it would have been impossible without the game assistance of over two-hundred show-goers. If you came to the gig in Paris, Utrecht, Brussels, Düsseldorf, Münster, Hamburg, Hanover, or Berlin, you heard us begin the encore with a desperate plea: Be our cinematographer. Each night we asked the crowd to pull out their phones and film our performance of “What You Want Is Gone,” a song that to them at the time was A COMPLETE UNKNOWN 💀. If you think about it, that makes effective camera work a challenge — a real guessing game. Compounding the difficulty, we needed everyone to hold their phones in landscape orientation, which is like asking modern students to handwrite an essay. Nevertheless, the hundreds of video files sent to us were chock full of slick camera moves, interesting angles, and intuitive zooms. Cheetahs can run real fast, crocodiles have a powerful bite, but humans may be the only earthly species with an instinctive ability to shoot well-composed video.

Thanks again to everybody who gobbled up valuable phone storage to help us make this. (Drop into the comments with timecode if you spot your footage!)

We’ve got a couple weeks at home before shows resume next month, which means the tour diaries will slow down (to maybe one a week?), but other urgent work continues. Top of the list is rehearsing more songs from Qualifying Miles for post-release touring — hard to believe there are still nine unreleased tracks 😅. We know that nearly every one of them will be somebody’s favorite, but the really interesting thing — the thing we can hardly wait for — is finding out which song everybody hates. There’s one on most albums, and on ALL albums with more than ten songs. Yes, by putting 12 songs on QM we knew we were dooming one track to universal opprobrium. Honestly, we’re excited — it’s been 15 years since we released an album with a roundly despised track (pooooor “Altered Beast”…), and a large if perverse side of us eagerly looks forward to doing it again. Will all of you hate “Promise Me”? “Starry-Eyed” (which almost became a single!)? Anticipation is eating us alive. Must focus on other things……

Shows. Friends, there are shows ahead. Many have not yet been announced, but many, also, have. (What a sentence. Started rewriting it halfway through, then thought, “Fuck it. This one wants to live.”) Let’s peruse these carefully, like a child appreciating her favorite cat’s eye marbles on a rainy Sunday afternoon, or a child thumbing through her favorite apps on a sunny Saturday…

First, we return to the U.K. for the release of Qualifying Miles. We’ve got “in-store” performances at some of England’s finest music shops on July 18th and the week that follows. Some of the shows are actually in venues operated by the stores, and each but one is fully electric — gone is the old model of squeezing a couple wooden guitars between aisles vinyl. We made this poster before we knew the actual ratio of electric-to-acoustic performances (photo taken on the edge of the Peak District, UK, during a day off late last month):

Hot tip: Looks like we’re probably going to add a second show in Kingson, same night, directly after the original. We’ll try to give this newsletter first crack. And there are waitlists for the Bristol and London shows, if you’re fond of low-stakes gambling: Bristol waitlist; London waitlist.

NEXT, a brand new concert that sits on our calendar like an island: July 30th at Union Pool, in Brooklyn, New York. This is a small room with a great sound system that we’ve been patronizing for years. Decided it was the perfect spot for a hometown record release party. Tickets went on sale today, and will disappear pretty quickly, so act soon if you’re interested. Here’s a poster, featuring a photo snapped in a basement just a 15-minute walk from the venue:

You can tell we were actually thinking about the venue.

Hot tip no. 2: We’ve got more US shows coming in September (announcing next week), but not in New York 💋.

And then… and then in October/November, we return to Europe. France, Spain, Italy, and more Germany, Qualifying Miles fully unleashed. (Tix here.) We’re really excited to get back to some of these recently-neglected spots, and to bring with us our finest album to date, maybe the finest album of all time, probably the definitive work of human art(??)

Of course there’s a poster. This one was photographed in the bar where we shot QM’s cover, at the same table, at around the same time of day — but weeks later and by a different photographer(!!!! 🤯). Magic is real in the world.

We are also wearing the same clothes. #professionals

Thanks for reading, and please let us know in the comments if you have any questions about “What You Want Is Gone.” You may also offer us advice, or an opinion.

A handful of rapid-fire links and reminders, in case you don’t feel like you’ve absorbed enough data:

• We put most of the hot looks from our tour merch booth — including the much-desired corduroy hat, the luxe silkscreen print, and the accursed guitar cat designs — on our UK web store.

• If you pre-ordered Qualifying Miles at either of our web stores or at a show, you now have access to our Velvet Rope VIP Backstage Afterparty website, where you can listen to Qualifying Miles acoustic (the whole thing) now, and watch something like 2+ hours of ever-expanding tour diary content (not recommended). Hit us up if you haven’t received access (this post’s comments or DM on instagram). Paid subscribers to this blog also enjoy access. Consider a pre-order or a paid subscription if you long for these exquisite privileges.

• If you haven’t already, please pre-save Qualifying Miles on your favorite streamer. We talked a little bit about the utility of pre-saving in our last post, but the tl;dr is that it will reverse climate change. 🥰🌍

• Our friend and collaborator Sean McVerry’s new album Steve (named after Chris’s dad? 🤔), which he previewed to ecstatic gasps while opening our recent tour, is out in just 10 days, and he’s throwing a bash in NYC to celebrate. If you can’t attend the show, make damn sure you hear the album. (More on Sean from this newsmagazine.)

• The genius Zeno (Zeno Pittarelli), who played cello on Qualifying Miles (that’s why “I Could Do Much Worse” makes you cry) started releasing some electronic music and unsurprisingly it’s fun as hell. There are only four tracks at this point, so you get to say you got in early. Spotify. Not Spotify. IG.

• Brian Bond, who has also opened shows for us (U.S. west coast and Europe) and even mixed a couple of b-sides, released a crackerjack of an album last week, name of Erase. It’s the weirdest thing we’ve heard him do. 👏 Spotify. Not Spotify. IG.

Enough! Back this weekend with a brand new Great Ape that honors one of Sheffield’s many seminal acts.

☕️ all around,

Keith & Chris

Chris, Johnny, Keith, Sean, and Keith with the new Lemmy statue in Stoke-on-Trent. This statue was only unveiled about a month ago, and this photo was taken on May 29th. As such, we believe we may have been the first Americans to see it. Let us know if you have contradictory evidence.