A little over a week ago, Phoenix announced their next album, Alpha Zulu, to follow up 2017’s Ti Amo. This announcement arrived with the release of the lead single “Tonight,” which features Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. Last night, Phoenix brought that song to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
The jaunty track sounds like it’s straight from the early 2010s. The performance is a breath of fresh air; it’s a sonorous, upbeat celebration. It looks like Koenig couldn’t make it, so they split the screen to play some of the music video depicting him singing from a taxi. It sounds great nonetheless.
Alpha Zulu was self-produced and recorded in Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The album came to fruition during lockdown, with most of the songs written in just ten days, according to Laurent “Branco” Brancowitz who plays keys and guitar. “We felt it would be a fantastic adventure to create something out of nothing in a museum,” he said in a statement. “And so with the pandemic, we could live exactly this scene, to be alone in an empty museum.”
Watch the band perform “Tonight” on The Late Show above.
Alpha Zulu is out 11/4 via Loyaute/Glassnote Records. Pre-order it here.
