Renowned Chicago indie rock band Wilco has announced their upcoming album Cousin, releasing September 29 on dBpm Records, and gifted fans with a new single “Evicted.”
“Evicted” tells the story of someone grappling with their responsibility for losing love, counterpointed by the pleasant strum of acoustic guitars and washed piano lines. “I guess I was trying to write from the point of view of someone struggling to make an argument for themself in the face of overwhelming evidence that they deserve to be locked out of someone’s heart,” comments lead singer Jeff Tweedy in a press release. “Self-inflicted wounds still hurt and in my experience they’re almost impossible to fully recover from.”
While Wilco’s latest song plays to the band’s strengths, Cousin will see the group experimenting with saxophones, “cheap Japanese guitars,” and cinematic drums machines. These musical explorations are due largely in part to the album’s sole producer, Welsh artist Cate Le Bon. In fact, Cousin is the first time since 2007’s Sky Blue Sky that Wilco has enlisted outside production assistance.
Le Bon first met Wilco at the band’s Solid Sound Festival in 2019, where Tweedy then invited her to their Chicago studio The Loft to aid in the recording of Cousin. Le Bon spoke on the collaboration saying, “The amazing thing about Wilco is they can be anything. They’re so mercurial, and there’s this thread of authenticity that flows through everything they do, whatever the genre, whatever the feel of the record. There aren’t many bands who are able to, this deep into a successful career, successfully change things up.”
Tweedy also spoke on the unique nature of the partnership saying, “Cate is very suspicious of sentiment, but she’s not suspicious of human connection. With her direction, Cousin evolved into something icier and more nighttime-ish than anything Wilco has created before. The album’s statement on human connection is writ small, revealed in vignettes of the lowest social unit: a pair.”
Wilco is set to tour the record later this month, performing throughout Europe and the United Kingdom in August and September before returning to the U.S for a slew of dates in late September and October.
Watch the lyric video for “Evicted” and check out the full tracklist for Cousin below.