Listen To Unknown Mortal Orchestra's New Album 'V'

There's not much Ruban Nielson's globally beloved Unknown Mortal Orchestra hasn't achieved in the musical realm during the past decade plus of releases, yet the Hawaiian / Aotearoa artist's creative vision burns even brighter on his first ever double album V. Drawing upon his Polynesian heritage (specifically: Hawaiian Hapa-haole music), FM radio memories and expressed love for weirdo pop, the Palm Springs-based songwriter / multi-instrumentalist's new fourteen track collection was laid down with his brother Kody Nielson (SILICON), their father Chris Nielson and Jake Portrait, all longterm UMO collaborators.

Scooping together earlier singles 'That Life', 'Weekend Run', 'I Killed Captain Cook', 'Nafja', 'Layla' and 'Meshuggah', V includes eight new songs for listeners to feast their ears upon, conjuring an almost hallucinatory aura via Nielson's mellifluous mastery of craft. The long awaited follow-up to 2018's kaleidoscopic Sex & Food — a five year period punctuated by UMO's sonically boundless SB-xx Christmas releases and numerous collaborations — Nielson stated the record arose in part from his meditations on family history, contemporary life and own sense of mortality...

"There was a series of tragedies that occurred in my family and extended family.There is a lot of tragedy and it kind of affected me in a way that I stopped thinking about my record and started getting more involved in family. That’s when I started to spend a lot more time in Hawai’i. My mother moved back there and my mother’s brother was sick, and so I spend a lot of time reconnecting with family in Hawai’i. Cousins and uncles and aunts. That sort of ended up halfway through the record expanding what the record was about and what it sounded like and also the way that I was working on it. I was leaving Palm Springs, going away, writing things, getting new experiences in Hawai’i and then coming back to Palm Springs and digesting what I had done."

Tune into the brand new UMOtv — "24/7 livestream featuring the band’s complete catalog, music videos, and more. Designed to be an algorithm-free home for all things UMO, UMOTV will feature unreleased music, exclusive visuals, a doomsday chatbotand other surprises."

'V' is out today on digitally, on vinyl LP, compact disc and cassette via Jagjaguwar.