THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Albert Hammond Jr. — the lead guitarist of Grammy and Brit Award-winning band The Strokes — began the songwriting process for his fifth solo album Melodies On Hiatus in a most experimental style.
Albert and his writing partner, Canadian songwriter and poet Simon Wilcox (whom he never met during the process), had lengthy conversations on the telephone. Simon would jot down notes from Albert’s stream of consciousness, draft the lyrics on her typewriter, and drop them into his letterbox! Albert then added the lyrics to the melodies he had crafted. The songwriting process became a long-distance, “anonymous love affair of ideas and lyrics,” he says.
The album covers themes of childhood, surviving adolescence, adulthood, vulnerability, fame, relationship with self and others, and is Albert’s “deconstructed, broken-down ego reaction” to his previous album, the 2018 release Francis Trouble. Melodies On Hiatus also features songs with GoldLink, Matt Helders of Arctic Monkeys, Steve Stevens and Rainsford, and was mixed by Tony Hoffer (Beck, Air, M83) and mastered by Dave Cooley at Elysian Masters (Paramore, Spoon, Tame Impala). He has released four previous solo albums. In the four years since his last full-length, The Strokes released their Top 10-charting Grammy-nominated record The New Abnormal and toured the world extensively.”
