THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Plain Truth: We drifted through it, arguing,” Godspeed You! Black Emperor write in a press release accompanying their new album No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead. “Every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.
“We sat down together and wrote it in one room, and then sat down in a different room, recording. No Title = What gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? What context? What broken melody? And then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile. The sun setting above beds of ash while we sat together, arguing. The old world order barely pretended to care. This new century will be crueler still. War is coming. Don’t give up. Pick a side. Hang on. Love, GY!BE”
Godspeed You! Black Emperor released a string of albums from 1997-2002 widely recognized as redefining what protest music can be, where longform instrumental chamber-rock compositions of immense feeling and power serve as soundtracks to late capitalist alienation and resistance. The band’s first four releases — especially F#A#∞ (1997) and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (2000) — are variously regarded as classics of the era and genre.
Godspeed’s legendary live performances, featuring multiple 16mm projectors beaming a collage of overlapping analog film loops and reels — along with the distinctive iconography, imagery and tactility of the band’s album artwork and physical LP packages — further define the sui generis aesthetic substance, ethos and mythos of this group.
GY!BE have issued two official band photos in their 25-year existence (the second was a 2010 recreation of the first from 1997) and have done a half-dozen collectively answered written interviews over that same span. The band have never had a website or social media accounts. They have never made a video. Few rock bands in our 21st century have been as steadfast in trying to let the work speak for itself and maintaining simple rules about minimising participation in cultures of personality, exposure, access, commodification or co-optation.
Following a seven-year hiatus that began in 2003, Godspeed returned to the stage in December 2010, curating the U.K. festival All Tomorrow’s Parties. The band’s post-reunion period has now lasted over a decade, marked by hundreds of sold-out live shows and four additional albums, all of which have been met with high acclaim.”
