THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “After 12 years of instrumental albums (ranging from a pair of solo piano releases, chamber music, collaborative albums with Boys Noize, Jarvis Cocker and Plastikman, and even a best-selling Christmas record), Chilly Gonzales has a lot to get off his chest.
The notebooks that sat unfilled since 2011’s orchestral rap opus The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales started to fill up again in early 2022 after ending a lengthy decade of psychoanalysis. Coincidence? Hardly.
Behind the wordplay and name-dropping (Ron Jeremy, Marie Kondo, Genghis Khan and Phillip Glass, to cite a few), the songs that made it to the new album Gonzo reveal an ongoing tension between persuasion and confession, delusion and self-awareness and finally, gratitude. The tension between creativity and commerce also continues to be a career-long exploration for Gonzalez.
But is this truly a rap album? Instrumental pieces such as the Stravinsky-esque Fidelio or the tearjerking Eau de Cologne will remind listeners of Gonzalez’s extravagant “musical genius” persona, as the words and rhymes from previous verses settle into their ears.”
