DJ Shadow Announces New Album The Mountain Will Fall Featuring Run the Jewels, Shares Title Track: Listen
DJ Shadow has announced a new album, The Mountain Will Fall, out June 24 via Mass Appeal. It’s the follow-up to 2011′s The Less You Know, the Better, the 2012 box set Total Breakdown: Hidden Transmissions From The MPC Era, 1992-1996, and the 2014 EP Liquid Amber. The album features guest appearances from Run the Jewels, Nils Frahm, and others. Find the tracklist, the album art, and a stream of the title track, below. (The previously-shared “Swerve” appears as a bonus track.) Last week, Pitchfork chatted with Shadow (real name: Josh Davis) about the making of the album. “Sometimes records are a struggle,” he said. “This record I knew exactly what I wanted to get across.”
“Every record I’ve ever made is a response to certain aspects of the prior record,” Davis told Pitchfork. He said he considered The Less You Know, the Better something of a “parting gift” to those fans who only identified with the sample-based sound he pioneered on his classic Endtroducing… LP. After two years of touring, The Mountain Will Fall started to take shape after Davis took his first DJ gig in a decade, at the influential L.A. club night Low End Theory. From there came festival DJ sets, performances with Diplo, and a shift from samples toward Ableton Live software as Davis immersed himself in contemporary music, launching the Liquid Amber label.
Davis said the DJ gigs gave him new ideas to which he could apply his vision, much as, say, hearing drum’n’bass had done in the ’90s. “Endtroducing… in 2016 would not sound like Endtroducing… in ’96 by design,” he added. “The same way I was trying to push the boundaries then, I’m trying to push my own boundaries now.”
The title The Mountain Will Fall comes from a tweet Davis sent on the day he announced he was starting work on his new album. “It’s like being at base camp and looking up at an unconquerable mountain; can’t dwell on the difficulty, you have to just start the journey,” he wrote, adding: “One step follows the next which leads the way to the next. There will be missteps but as long as the vision is whole, the mountain will fall.”
Davis hasn’t done away with sampling entirely. The title track includes a sample of Italian musician Dario Baldan Bembo’s 1975 orchestra-laden work “Prima Alba.” He happened to pull the record out of one of the storage units where he keeps his vast trove of recordings. “Obviously, people have used classical music ever since Coldcut used it on ‘Beats + Pieces’ in 1987,” Davis told Pitchfork. “It’s not like there’s anything inherently groundbreaking about using classical music. But for me, I wanted to utilize aspects of it that were unusual. I felt like it would give me an interesting springing-off point.”
As for “Nobody Speak,” the collaboration with Run the Jewels, Davis said he thought of the duo of El-P and Killer Mike as soon as he had made the “boom-bappy, kind of hip-hop rap” instrumental. “I was just like, that’s it, they’re the only people I want on this track,” he said. “I’ve known El for almost 20 years.” Though the two have collaborated in various ways over the years, this was the first time they’ve recorded together in the studio, with all three performers meeting in Los Angeles before the holidays last year.
When it comes to the other collaborations, Davis told Pitchfork that “Bergschrund” is actually one of two tracks he worked on with Nils Frahm, so the other one might be finished at some point. “I realized I was familiar with his music but didn’t even really know it,” Davis told Pitchfork. He said he was looking for someone who was “working in the instrumental space, but anything we do together is going to sound completely different than anything we could do on our own.”
Elsewhere, “The Sideshow,” with Ernie Fresh, is meant as an old-school scratch track without the familiar tropes of the form. “I wanted to create an alternative universe where you find a rapper who’s really, really dope, he’s not known to anybody, none of the breaks are known, none of the scratches are known, although at some point they will be known,” he said.
Davis said the number of guests on the album was limited on purpose. “I don’t really want it to be one of these records where it’s this hot rapper, this hot rapper, this feature,” he says he told his manager. “I didn’t want to have to convince anybody that it was worth their time to be on my records. [Laughs] I just didn’t want to make that kind of record.”
The Mountain Will Fall:
01 The Mountain Will Fall
02 Nobody Speak [ft. Run the Jewels]
03 Three Ralphs
04 Bergschrund [ft. Nils Frahm]
05 The Sideshow [ft. Ernie Fresh]
06 Depth Charge
07 Mambo
08 Ashes to Oceans [ft. Matthew Halsall]
09 Pitter Patter [ft. G Jones & Bleep Bloop]
10 California
11 Ghost Town
12 Suicide Pact
13 Swerve (iTunes Bonus Track)
DJ Shadow:
06-24 Strasbourg, France – Artefact Festival
07-02 Amsterdam, Netherlands – Pitch Festival
07-08 Liege, Belgium – Les Ardentes
07-14 Sesimbra, Portugal – Super Bock, Super Rock
07-16 Paris, France – The Peacock Society Festival
07-17 Benicassim, Spain – Benicassim
07-23 Cheshire, England – Blue Dot Festival
07-28 Sibenik, Croatia – Island of Obonjan
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