audiobooks Share Video for 'LaLaLa It's The Good Life'

Today David Wrench and Evangeline Ling, aka audiobooks, have shared the video for their latest single, "LaLaLa It's the Good Life", crafted by creative team Rottingdean Bazar and photographer Annie Collinge. audiobooks' new album Astro Tough is due for release on October 1st, 2021 via Heavenly Recordings.

Brighton-based Rottingdean Bazar say of the project: "We conceived and made the video with photographer Annie Collinge who we work with a lot, although usually on still fashion photographs. Rephotographing fabric prints of people is something we had already been experimenting with in stills, and whilst doing that we noticed that it lends itself to moving image. We photographed the band in a studio and laid out prints of them and other objects. After that just the three of us spent time in Rottingdean capturing the prints in movement. James (Rottingdean Bazaar) took the lead in the movement and acted as the hand model, as he has the best timing of all of us."

audiobooks threw absolutely everything at their 2018 debut album, Now! (in a minute), a hectic, head-spinning blast of freewheeling freak-pop genius. On its follow-up Astro Tough they've somehow found a way to ramp things up even further, concentrating their chaotic energy and inherent weirdness into a record that's bigger, deeper and more powerful than even its predecessor.

"The first album was a photograph of the beginnings of the project, recorded without any overall plan," Wrench explains. "Astro Tough is more scripted, but a script that still allowed for lots of improvised scenes."

Multi-instrumentalist and super-producer/mixer Wrench, known for his work with Frank Ocean, the xx, Caribou, David Byrne, Manic Street Preachers, and Goldfrapp, is as comfortable unleashing monolithic psychedelic wig-outs and heavy dub-driven monsters as he is crafting irresistible synth-pop bangers. Writer, vocalist and visual artist Ling is as chameleonic as she is charismatic, able to jump from detachment to rawness to aggression to tenderness to hilarity to toe-curling awkwardness, sometimes within the same song.

Above all else Astro Tough is a record that brims with energy. With their roles diverging more clearly than on their debut - Wrench handles almost all the music, Ling the lyrics and vocals - both dig deeper into the enormous emotional potential of each. "I definitely go to town with my feelings," says Ling. "If I find I'm in a certain mindset, I'll go as extreme as I can with it in my lyrics. I know I'm being over-dramatic."

audiobooks placed a significant emphasis on refinement this time around, concentrating and intensifying their chaotic powers. When performing early iterations of tracks like "Black Lipstick" and "First Move" live while on tour for their first album, they paid close attention to what worked and what didn't, how best to make their crowds dance, cringe, cry and laugh. "Playing stuff you know is a draft to an audience feels a bit naked, but I feel like I learnt loads from doing like that," says Ling. "Finding out what was working on stage was a good way to test things out."

As audiobooks were making the final adjustments to their new record, the world around them was getting grimmer by the day. As a result, a darker side to their sound began to bubble to the surface, a newfound heaviness that's apparent on the eery and driving "He Called Me Bambi", for example, or the whirling "Trouble In Business Class". "We would have got there anyway," Wrench points out; this is not a 'lockdown record', "but being in that frame of mind did make it easier to see how we needed to tweak things. There are light moments of this record, but in general the lyrics are definitely darker."

On Astro Tough audiobooks are completely sincere. They're also completely joyous, wild, angry, powerful, hilarious, vicious, vulnerable and intense and most of all completely brilliant. It's the sound of David Wrench and Evangeline Ling reaching new peaks of creativity, more confident than ever before in their abilities to forge something focused, singular and unique out of the explosive combination of their talents.

Listen here: