“No matter where you lived on the planet, it seemed like we were all going through something together during the spring of 2020,” Captain Kirk Douglas says of the experiences that informed New Unknown, the second album he’s recorded under the moniker Hundred Watt Heart. “Though we all might have been experiencing it through a different lens, it was just such an unprecedented moment in time. So while processing it for myself, it felt like many sentiments could be universal.”
The longtime Roots guitarist cites the pandemic, the killing of George Floyd and the 2020 election as some of “the emotional fodder that I documented on the record.” Beyond all of this, New Unknown also draws on some additional personal upheaval.
He recorded the basic tracks with a longtime friend, drummer Ricc Sheridan (Earl Greyhound), then enlisted some of his Roots bandmates: keyboardist James Poyser, saxophonist Ian Hendrickson-Smith and trumpeter Dave Guy, as well as Peter Readman, who added strings to the opening track, “Breathe In.”
“Turbulent Times was a very rock-forward album, but I wanted to ease into the rock aspect of things this time around,” he observes. “I wanted it to read like a musical, and I didn’t want to veer into overtly rock territory for too long. It’s me processing the world around me both internally and externally. So I arrived at a sequence where I enjoyed the world being revealed to me. Even though I was intimately involved in the birthing of this world, it’s how I felt good listening to the songs. It told a story to me. And I felt that if it did that for me, then it would probably do that for others.”
- Format: Vinyl
- Blue Color Vinyl
- Limited Edition
- Genre: Rock
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Track Listing:
- Breathe In
- Land of Look Beyond
- Ain't No High
- Illuminate
- We Can Be One
- Over The Ocean
- Breath of Fire
- Neverending
- Retaliate
