Cate Le Bon has always had a taste for the surreal, but her seventh album might be her most emotionally exposed to date. Michelangelo Dying, announced today for release on 26th September, is the sound of a wound being studied under light. Delicately, obsessively, and without promise of closure.
The lead single, ‘Heaven Is No Feeling’, arrives with a video directed by H. Hawkline that doubles as a cryptic hall of mirrors. “Cate watching her, watching her watching Cate,” he says. The song itself is spare and seductive, its lyrics sketched in post-love abstraction. “You smoke our love like you’ve never known violence.” Synths pulse with a bruised kind of restraint.
Written across Hydra, Cardiff, Los Angeles and finally the Californian desert, the album came from grief and instinct more than design. “No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason,” Le Bon says. “There is repetition and chaos.” The record emerged not through clarity, but through emotional gravity she couldn’t resist.
Musically, it continues the icy palette she’s been honing since Reward and Pompeii, though the textures are rougher now. Co-produced with Samur Khouja and coloured by Euan Hinshelwood’s saxophone, these tracks twist emotion through filters instead of spelling it out.
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