The first new studio album in five years from Yo La Tengo is their most live-sounding album in years, and there’s a reason for it. Recorded at YLT's practice space in Hoboken NJ, the new material captures the collaborative energy and eclecticism that has defined the band's career as it enters its 40th year.
Times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. But their latest effort, This Stupid World, was created all by themselves. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has become more direct.
This Stupid World is available on CD, via streaming outlets, and vinyl, but only the double LP features a 10th track on Side D available exclusively on vinyl.
Yo La Tengo is one of the most beloved and respected bands in America. for nearly thirty years, Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew have enjoyed success entirely on their own terms – playing the world’s best concert halls, museums, and dives, dominating critics’ lists, doing a Simpsons theme, playing the Velvet Underground in I Shot Andy Warhol, sharing stages with some of the most important musicians of our time, and even creating a holiday tradition onto themselves with their yearly series of Hanukkah shows at Hoboken, New Jersey’s legendary club Maxwells, from which they’ve donated hundreds of thousands to charity. The trio also returned to NYC's Bowery Ballroom for their storied annual eight-night Hanukkah residency this past December and will be touring across North America throughout 2023.