Cate Le Bon - Michelangelo Dying [CD]

Format: CD 
Catalogue No.: MEX353-2
Barcode: 0762184287522
Release Date: 26 Sep 2025
Genre: Indie/Alternative

 Its creation led by pure emotion, Cate Le Bon’s seventh record ‘Michelangelo Dying’ usurped the album she thought she was making. The product of all-consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album about love, and in the process became a kind of exorcism. What emerges is a wonderfully iridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up - but which in doing so, picks at it too.
 Musically, there is a continuation and expansion of a sound - a machine with a heart - that has taken shape over her last two records (2019’s ‘Reward’ and 2022’s ‘Pompeii’) as Le Bon has increasingly taken control of the playing and producing herself. As guitars and saxophones are pushed through pedals and percussion and voices are fed through filters, an iridescent, green and silky sound emerges, with flashes of the artistic singularities of David Bowie, Nico, John McGeoch and Laurie Anderson surfacing and disappearing below the waterline throughout.
 What we’re left with is an ever-changing, continuous entity, a kind of song cycle. Each iteration reflects and progresses the last, each one a shard of the same broken mirror - shifting, glinting, concealing and revealing, depending on how it is turned in the light. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, “No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos. I eventually allowed myself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching fora revelation or order to any of it.”
 An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener and artist, ‘Michelangelo Dying’ knows what it is to hold, to be held and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. “The characters are interchangeable” concludes Cate, “but at the end of it all, it’s me meeting myself.”
 “Her music has depth, strangeness and wonder: ornate synths meet lugubrious brass, slivers of guitar, kaleidoscopic lyrics and a voice that can be sweet and dusky, elastic and chilling.” - The Guardian
 “Le Bon’s creative power remains in the circuitous jaggedness with which she navigates pop and poetry, uncertainty and revelation.” - Pitchfork
 “Her finest work yet” - St. Vincent
 September - November 2025 UK / EU tour.
 Available to independent retailers on Bone White vinyl.
 Press - Reviews & features in The Guardian The Line of Best Fit (cover with exclusive photoshoot).
 Radio - BBC 6 Music premiere, interview with St Vincent, NPR, KEXP session, 3voor12 session, 2 Metre session.

Tracklisting
Jerome
Love Unrehearsed
Mothers of Riches
Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?
Pieces of My Heart
About Time
Heaven Is No Feeling
Body As A River
Ride (featuring John Cale)
I Know What’s Nice