Indie rock band, Yo La Tengo are hitting the road in 2023, including a date at The London Palladium. The news coincides with details of their sixteenth studio album release, This Stupid World.

Time keeps moving and things keep changing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back. Yo La Tengo have raced time for nearly four decades and, to my ears, they just keep winning. The trio’s latest victory is called This Stupid World, a spellbinding set of reflective songs that resist the ticking clock. This music is not so much timeless as time-defiant. “I want to fall out of time,” Ira Kaplan sings in Fallout. “Reach back, unwind.”

Part of how Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew escape time is by watching it pass, even accepting it when they must. “I see clearly how it ends / I see the moon rise as the sun descends,” they sing during opener, Sinatra Drive Breakdown. In the séance-like “Until it Happens,” Kaplan plainly intones, “Prepare to die / Prepare yourself while there’s still time.” But This Stupid World is also filled with calls to reject time –bide it, ignore it, waste it. “Stay alive,” he adds later in the same song. “Look away from the hands of time.”

Of course, 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. They made This Stupid World 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. – Marc Masters