After taking what they called a ’88-month moratorium’, Amusement Parks On Fire are ready to unveil ‘An Archaea’, their first new album in over a decade.
Drawing from innumerable, often entirely unanticipated musical approaches whilst defying direct description, this new record sounds simultaneously uncanny, utterly unique and yet unmistakably the work of Amusement Parks On Fire.
Timeless though also all-so timely, the record is inadvertently a reluctant future relic of a strange and confounding stint in spacetime. It’s a work that seeks to highlight this abstraction by subverting our mode of being. It’s a labour of life-and-death that seeks to find freedom and even tentative optimism in catharsis.
Born as the eremitic endeavour of an adolescent Michael Feerick, Amusement Parks On Fire emanated in around 2004 with the release of the eponymous debut album. Released on Geoff Barrow (Portishead, Beak>)’s Invada label, it was described by the New Musical Express as ‘hedonistic teenage genius’.
After a series of concept singles acclaimed by the likes of Rough Trade and Drowned in Sound and following several years of international incidence, in 2009 the band crash-landed in Los Angeles to make the sun-drenched tertiary release Road Eyes. Influential magazine Alternative Press characterised it as ‘a near-perfect album’.
The enigmatic art-rock lifers then took a self-described ’88-month moratorium’ for undisclosed reasons, making a surprise recrudescence in 2017 with the single Our Goal To Realise, the EP All The New Ends and a European tour in 2018.
