Godspeed You! Black Emperor - G_d's Pee AT STATE'S END!

Written on the road back when the road was still a place, and then tracked in masks at Hotel2Tango over six days in October 2020, at the front edge of the second wave. Godspeed's seventh album arrived in April 2021 into a world that had finally caught up with the band's usual mood. Jace Lasek recorded and mixed it, his first time working with the group, and Harris Newman mastered it at Grey Market in Montreal.

Two twenty-minute side-length trajectories carry the 12". "A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind)" opens on shortwave numbers-station transmissions before unfolding through "Job's Lament" and "First Of The Last Glaciers" into some of the most openly melodic writing the band has committed to tape. Side two runs from "GOVERNMENT CAME" out to the finale of "ASHES TO SEA or NEARER TO THEE," which may be the single most galvanizing stretch in the whole discography. The bonus 10" holds two self-contained six-minute pieces: the elegiac "Fire At Static Valley" and the closing "OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN," dedicated to D.H.

The band's demands are printed inside: empty the prisons, take power from the police, end the forever wars, tax the rich until they're impoverished. Fifty-two minutes of music that plays like a protest banner.

The double vinyl edition pairs a 180-gram LP with a 10" EP, pressed at Optimal and housed in a gatefold jacket on uncoated artboard. Front cover taijitu flowers and back cover tear gas canisters are rendered in raised thermographic black ink, with a colour flood interior, artworked inner sleeves, and download card. Constellation, catalog CST156.