Arab Strap – “I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍”

Following their critically-acclaimed UK Top 20 album “As Days Get Dark”, Arab Strap return with their 2nd long player for Mogwai’s Rock Action Records. “I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍” was released on 10th May 2024 and is available on emoji yellow coloured vinyl, CD and digital.

The first single of the album, entitled “Bliss”, is a song that perfectly exemplifies their most sonically expansive album to date. An almost entirely electronic disco banger with just a hint of trusty guitar, it’s Arab Strap at their most immediate and vital. Lyrically, the song addresses the horrors of online hate, as vocalist Aidan Moffat says “It’s about women being terrorised online; it’s about cowardice and bigotry. It’s about how we expose ourselves on social platforms while hiding alone at home. But you can dance to it too!” The track comes accompanied by a video directed by award-winning, Glasgow based director Ains featuring a striking dancer personifying a character trapped in a dystopian realm.

The album examines many more urgent, timely themes, such as conspiracy theories, online addiction, and the forgotten souls of our seemingly connected planet, all wrapped up in the most adventurous earworms of the band’s career.  The result is a record loaded with what Moffat calls “a quiet anger”, an album with equal parts rage and love for “the tangible world and intangible world, and which one you choose to believe and engage with.”

Almost 28 years after their debut, Arab Strap have never sounded more essential, and this new record is a fierce testament to their laser focus on wider horizons. Written and performed exclusively by Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffat, and finessed with longtime collaborator Paul Savage, the album furthers the band’s transformation from swooning, slow-core romantics to raging, alt-pop chroniclers.

“I’m totally fine with it  don’t give a fuck anymore ” may sound like the title of an album by a band giving up (it’s just a text from the band’s live drummer that Moffat thought was funny), but in reality it’s an album that stands to clearly define a new creative period for Arab Strap.  With the band having recently wrapped up a tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of their 1998 album Philophobia, this new album feels charged by a desire to move forward and explore new terrain. “The tour’s been fun, but I’ll be glad it’s over so we can move on,” laughs Middleton, while Moffat echoes him. “The Philophobia gigs have been a way of saying goodbye to the old us,” he says. “It was a very gentle, quiet tour, so I expect this year we’ll just be playing banger after banger – I think we’ve earned the right to make some noise now.”

You can enjoy “banger after banger” at the following venues throughout 2024:

21st May – Fire Station, Sunderland

22nd May – Castle & Falcon, Birmingham

23rd May – Lantern, Bristol

24th May – Koko, London

25th May – Gorilla, Manchester

26th May – Brudenell, Leeds

21st Sept – Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow

Tracklisting:

1. Allatonceness
2. Bliss
3. Sociometer Blues
4. Hide Your Fires
5. Summer Season
6. Molehills
7. Strawberry Moon
8. You’re Not There
9. Haven’t You Heard
10. Safe & Well
11. Dreg Queen
12. Turn Off The Light