Phoenix Soars In The Sky With Their Latest Album Alpha Zulu Out Today!
In aviation, alpha zulu refers to a phrase used in a communications test before takeoff. So, passengers, buckle your seats because GRAMMY-winning French band Phoenix are set to fly with their latest album Alpha Zulu on Loyaute/Glassnote Records.
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.
There’s a new looseness here for Phoenix, a clash of emotions, styles, and eras borne from the mad stylistic incubator that is the Musée des Arts Décoratifs: “The Only One,” with its blissful rain-drop percussion, clashes against the pummeling, almost techno-strafed “All Eyes on Me”; there’s a focus on “negative space” – a concept echoed in the white walls around the museum’s exhibits – and a sense of pure romance, albeit tinged with a mature understanding of how precious that feeling becomes with age. "My Elixir,” is a lonely, distant song with a sweetly rinky-dink beat that has the air of karaoke sung in an empty bar. “Tell me anywhere is home,” Thomas pleads in the song: “Can we go home?” He was thinking about how on Ti Amo, Phoenix finally said “I love you” – “but in a different language”, he admits. Now living in an increasingly apocalyptic-seeming US, the situation called for directness.
