#Latenightthoughts: Can't Stop Listening to Barns Courtney New Album 'Supernatural'
NEW ALBUM SUPERNATURAL OUT NOW VIA AVENUE A/VIRGIN RECORDS
PURCHASE/STREAM HERE
NORTH AMERICA, THE UK AND EUROPEAN TOUR WITH THE STRUTS IN KICKS OFF TUESDAY, JULY 23
Barns Courtney tour dates
7/23 - House of Blues - Houston, TX
7/24 - Stubb's - Austin, TX
7/26 - The Marathon - Nashville, TN
7/27 - The Factory - Chesterfield, MO
7/28 - Andrew J Brady Music Center - Cincinnati, OH
7/30 - Bottle & Cork - Dewey Beach, DE
8/1 - Anthem - Washington, DC
8/2 - Fillmore - Philadelphia, PA
8/3 - Stone Pony Summer Stage - Asbury Park, NJ
8/4 - HOB - Boston, MA
8/6 - State Theater - Portland, ME
8/7 - College Street - New Haven, CT
8/9 - Royal Oak - Detroit, MI
8/10 - History - Toronto, ON
8/11 - Stage AE - Pittsburgh, PA
8/13 - The Rave - Milwaukee, WI
8/14 - Kemba Live - Columbus, OH
8/16 - Rock The Ruins - Indianapolis, IN
8/17 - The Riviera Theatre - Chicago, IL
8/18 - The Fillmore - Minneapolis, MN
8/20 - Mission Ballroom - Denver, CO
8/21 - The Complex - Rockwell - Salt Lake City, UT
8/23 - Roseland Theater - Portland, OR
8/24 - Showbox SoDo - Seattle, WA
8/25 - The Orpheum - Vancouver, BC
8/27 - Grand Sierra Theatre - Reno, NV
8/28 - Fox Theater - Oakland, CA
8/30 - Marquee - Tempe, AZ
8/31 - House of Blues - Anaheim, CA9/27 - Barrowlands - Glasgow, UK
9/28 - O2 Academy - Leeds, UK
9/29 - Rock City - Nottingham, UK
10/1 - Albert Hall - Manchester, UK
10/2 - O2 Institute - Birmingham, UK
10/4 - NX - Newcastle, UK
10/5 - SWX - Bristol, UK
10/6 - Roundhouse - London, UK
10/8 - La Madeleine - Brussels, BEL
10/9 - 013 Poppodium - Tilburg, NL
10/10 - Carlswerk Victoria - Cologne, GER
10/12 - Bataclan - Paris, FRA
10/13 - Docks - Hamburg, GER
10/15 - Vega - Copenhagen, DEN
10/16 - Huxleys - Berlin, GER
10/17 - Progresja - Warsaw, POL
10/19 - Lucerna Music Bar - Prague, CZR
10/20 - Komplex 457 - Zurich, SWI
10/21 - Fabrique - Milan, ITA
Barns Courtney has released his long-awaited new album Supernatural via Avenue A/Virgin Records. His raucous third LP is a high-flying and nail-biting odyssey through a dystopian world of his own creation—a concept album that nonetheless is packed with universal truisms when it comes to who we are, and what we try to avoid becoming.
He has teased the album with the recent single “National Treasure,” which Wolf In A Suit labeled “"wonderfully unique (and) rebellious." The song introduces fans to the album’s narrative center, a post-apocalyptic cult leader and his terrifying ascent in a fictional dystopia amidst a oil-starved world worshiping natural gas company logos. He has also shared a video for the album’s “Supernatural” - watch both below.
Hailed by Rolling Stone as a “stomping, swaggering rock & roll balancing act teetering between blinding light and total darkness,” Barns Courtney will be the direct support for The Struts on their forthcoming North American tour. The dates kick off on July 23 in Houston, TX and conclude on August 31 at the House of Blues in Anaheim, CA. Following that he heads to The UK and Eruope to tour as the co-headline with the band. Tickets are on-sale now here and all dates are listed below.
Barns Courtney—a near-lifelong musician who started writing songs at age six and later spent time living in his car as he struggled to kickstart his career—the push for transformation and transcendence lies at the heart of all his work. His star-making debut The Attractions of Youth dropped in 2017 and the follow-up, 2019’s 404 was a top 25 at Alt Radio and top 40 at AAA. Over the course of his career he has received critical acclaim with multiple Gold singles in the US and UK including “99” (which reached the top 5), “Glitter and Gold” and “Fire.” Performances on Conan, The Late Late Show with James Corden and video game syncs including Apex Legends, FIFA 17 and more, have all helped propel Barns to the forefront of the rock world.
With Supernatural Courtney has returned with a record that triumphantly announces his return while launching him head-first into the future’s awesome stratosphere. The road to Supernatural was, as with all accomplished works, not without difficulties: Courtney was previously riding high on the release of his sensational second album 404 in 2019, before COVID hit and shut down the world around him: “The immense amount of work that I'd been putting in, touring eleven and a half months out of every year for six years, hit me all at once like a ton of bricks,” he recalls. “The moment I had a chance to breathe, all my demons saw the opportunity with the waters calmed to raise their disgusting awful hideous heads out from the depths. They challenged me all at once, and I was paralyzed.”
Struggling with an all-too-relatable case of lockdown-era writers’ block, Courtney nonetheless pushed through with the long genesis of Supernatural’s ten tracks; at one point, he contemplated quitting music entirely while in the process of being “chewed up and spat out” by multiple labels before landing at his new home of Avenue A. “We have to rise to the challenge of the adversities that we come across in our lives, so I gave it everything I had—and this is the best that I have to offer.” he says, recalling the recording process as “atrociously difficult”: “It was almost as if there was some sort of universal force fighting me at every single corner.”
From the electrified music on display throughout Supernatural, you wouldn’t be able to tell: Courtney’s never sounded so fierce and energized, a result of embracing fresh narrative perspectives that came out of “A deep boredom from having talked about myself —my career and my story—for six years.” Drawing influence from Ziggy Stardust and the retrofuturism of the late ‘60s fashion world, the album’s narrative centers around a post-apocalyptic cult leader’s terrifying ascent in a fictional dystopia.
“It was almost easier for me to sit down and write this enormously detailed story than it was to just sit down with my guitar,” Courtney explains, elaborating on how the creative process helped him process his own surroundings. “I realized that it was not only a story about a cult leader, but also allegorical of my own terrible fears about climate change. We're all like hurtling ever faster into the void of our own demise, on a linear path into the grave.”
Beyond storms on the horizon, Supernatural also concerns itself with Courtney’s own hedonistic tendencies—and what happens when the party’s truly over. Reflecting on own relationship with hedonism, “The pleasure can turn to pain very quickly, if given the chance,” he admits. “I realized that I was struggling with a life where nothing was off limits—willpower held no sway anymore. I'd become a complete and utter victim and puppet of my basal lizard brain.”
To bring all of this to life in his own stage persona, Courtney teamed up with photographer Haris Nukem to help fold these experiential influences into the embodiment of a character that, in his words, “dedicates his life and ideals to the lofty banners of ultimate hedonism, only to be undone by his own logic in the end.” The album’s “National Treasure” introduces you to this character in all his conspiratorial glory, amidst a oil-starved world worshiping natural gas company logos. Then there’s the surprisingly tranquil and lovely “Machine Gun Sun,” which zooms out to embrace more existential and universal concerns—ironically, after it kickstarts with bombs going off. “This is basically a song about how we're all doomed to die and there's almost nothing we can do about it, so we may as well enjoy ourselves,” Courtney says. “The plane is going down. So are we going to bury our heads—or are we going to sing one last song?” Such notions were Inspired by the reactions—the general societal breakdowns of everything—that Courtney witnessed during the pandemic: “When things go slightly awry, people start fighting over resources. There was sort of a disturbing lack of camaraderie in that time, and you saw the cracks of society starting to widen ever so slightly.”
Amidst all this calamity—from the recording process itself to the unstable future that Supernatural’s themes lean towards—Courtney ended up finding his own true essence during this album’s creative journey. “I learned the importance of standing up for my creative integrity, despite efforts to push me in one way or another. I can do a lot more on my own than I've realized,” he says while reflecting on his achievements as represented on the album.“I didn't realize that I was capable of such things. I really spearheaded the operation and called all the shots, which was terrifying—but it culminated in something that really works.”
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