Phoenix Have Just Dropped A Powerfully Moving Single “Winter Solstice”

Phoenix have just dropped a moving single, “Winter Solstice,” from their upcoming album Alpha Zulu set for release on 4th November 2022 on Loyaute/Glassnote Records. A standout track from the album, the song might be the band’s most moody, a melancholic rumination that gradually pulses from dark into light.

It is the band’s only song that wasn’t composed together in the studio but instead created on two different continents for the first time in the band’s history. The track was built out of a long loop that the band’s members - Lauren Brancowitz, Christian Mazzalai, and Deck D’Arcy - sent to frontman Thomas Mars, asking him to record a stream of consciousness, a song that loosely alludes to Phoenix classics like “Love Like A Sunset Pt. 1 and 2” and “Bankrupt,” but sounds like something new entirely. 

In conjunction with the release, the band share a music video directed by prior Ti Amo collaborator Warren Fu, who drew on the band’s German Expressionist movie influences. If “Winter Solstice” looks to fill the void that was created by the distance of the pandemic, the video faces the void head-on. 

Produced by the band themselves, and recorded in Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which sits in the Palais du Louvre, Alpha Zulu is everything Phoenix does best: effortlessly catchy melodies married with always-innovative production, resulting in what is destined to be one of 2022’s albums of the year. Indeed, Alpha Zulu – the band’s first album since 2017’s critically acclaimed record Ti Amo – is an immediate reminder of what has made Phoenix one of the most beloved artists of the last two decades, reinforcing the band’s enduring – and continued – influence on pop culture.