Cage the Elephant have announced details of their fifth studio album, Social Cues, due April 19 via RCA Records. In advance of the release the band has shared the first single from the record, “Ready to Let Go,” with a video directed by lead singer Matt Shultz.
Social Cues was produced by John Hill (Santigold, Florence + The Machine, Portugal. The Man, tUnE-yArDs) at Battle Tapes Recording, Blackbird Studio and Sound Emporium in Nashville and The Village Recording Studio in Los Angeles. It was mixed by Tom Elmhirst and mastered by Randy Merrill in New York City.
The majority of the material on Social Cues was written during the unravelling of Shultz’s relationship. In order make sense of such a difficult experience, he explored the hidden recesses of his psyche, creating characters to tell different parts of his personal story.
He explained, “it can be a vehicle to act out things that are hard to confront.” He went on to say, "when I'm creating, I try to put myself in a reactive state of improvisational thought. I let images just arise in my mind and wait for it to evoke an emotional response and then when it does, I know I'm on to something. I was watching a lot of Fassbinder films, like World on a Wire and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. I was thinking about their beauty coupled with the graphic surrealism of Aronofsky.”
Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.
