Latest news with #XLRecordings
Scoop
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Nourished By Time Announces New Album The Passionate Ones
Nourished By Time Announces New Album The Passionate Ones On August 22nd 2025, Baltimore singer-songwriter and producer Nourished By Time will release his highly anticipated new album The Passionate Ones via XL Recordings. Crafted between Baltimore, London, and NYC, The Passionate Ones is a sermon, a twelve-track catharsis, howled from the underbelly of late-stage capitalism, a blueprint for building your own altar in the ruins of the American Dream. The project launches today with 'Max Potential,' a track revealing a soul unready for the weight of its own potential, accompanied by a music video—directed by and starring Nourished By Time's Marcus Brown—shot beneath David Hammons's Day's End sculpture in New York City. Initially created in Los Angeles' in late 2019, Nourished By Time emerged as Marcus Brown's escape from the monotony of his day jobs and a continuously crushed spirit by an increasingly corrupt world. Channeling his deeply personal and sharply observational visions into songwriting, Brown has created a singular sonic world shaped by his hometown of Baltimore's rich and eclectic musical heritage where jazz, punk, indie, hip hop, electronic and R&B collide in raw harmony. On The Passionate Ones, Brown tackles love, labor, existentialism, dreams, disillusionment, and hope through the lens of metamodernism, documenting an American story of an artist using their vices to keep them afloat while they follow their passions and dreams. The Passionate Ones arrives in the wake of a radiant ascent. With Erotic Probiotic 2 (Scenic Route), Nourished by Time cracked open 2023—earning Pitchfork's Best New Music and topping Gorilla vs Bear's year-end list, while drawing praise from The Guardian, The FADER, Paste, and more. 2024's Catching Chickens (XL) only deepened the allure: CRACK Magazine placed him on its cover, naming 'Hell of a Ride' the track of the year. The song echoed across NPR, Resident Advisor, CLASH, The FACE, Mixmag, UPROXX, and Spotify's Best Songs of 2024 lists, and he performed a magnetic live performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert's #LateShowMeMusic live series. Along the way, Nourished By Time's voice threaded through collaborations with Yaeji, Kacy Hill, and evilgiane, a spectral remix of Dry Cleaning's 'Gary Ashby,' and tours with Metronomy, Panda Bear, and Toro y Moi, solidifying his position as one of contemporary music's most intriguing and vital new artists. The Passionate Ones is available pre-order now as a LP (black, crystal clear, and limited edition white-label), CD and to pre-save on all digital platforms. Out August 22, 2025 worldwide. Advertisement - scroll to continue reading © Scoop Media
Scoop
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Richard Russell Remixes Everything Is Recorded Under His RLr Moniker
Richard Russell steps up under his rLr alias to remix his own Everything Is Recorded project. Released via XL Recordings, the rLr remix of 'Never Felt Better' sees Russell breaking apart the original into a bass-heavy audio collage that warps and chops Sampha and Florence Welch's original vocals while beaming in legendary mixtape pioneer Kid Capri from somewhere in 1990's New York City. It's the first rLr remix in over five years, following previous remixes for the likes of Crass, Viviankrist, Ibeyi and Roots Manuva. The original 'Never Felt Better' features on Everything Is Recorded's acclaimed third album Temporary. Released in February, the album features an incredible roll call of collaborators including Sampha, Florence Welch, Bill Callahan, Noah Cyrus, Maddy Prior, Berwyn, Alabaster Deplume, Jah Wobble, Yazz Ahmed, Laura Groves, Kamasi Washington, Rickey Washington, Roses Gabor, Jack Peňate, Samantha Morton, Clari Freeman-Taylor and Nourished By Time. Created over four years from 2020 to 2024, Temporary was recorded in the main at Russell's own west London Copper House studio, alongside sessions in Tottenham, Cumbria, Dorset, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and is set to build on previous acclaimed releases including 2018's eponymous, Mercury Prize-nominated debut album. Temporary is the first full Everything Is Recorded release in over four years but followed a prolific period of music-making for Richard Russell. As Everything Is Recorded, he released four album-length pieces via Soundcloud and Bandcamp only over the previous twelve months: Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox, Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. Each was recorded during extended, one-day improvised jams on the date of their respective titles at Russell's west London Copper House studio, featuring an eclectic cast of musicians and collaborators. Earlier this year, he teamed up with singer, songwriter and acclaimed actor and director Samantha Morton as musical duo SAM MORTON to release their acclaimed debut album Daffodils & Dirt. Meanwhile, he produced 'Four Kinds of Horses' from i/o, Peter Gabriel's first number one album in over 30 years, as well as this old house, the debut EP from tipped London trio Mary In The Junkyard. It was for these records, alongside previous lauded production work for the likes of Bobby Womack, Damon Albarn, Gil Scott-Heron and Ibeyi, that Russell received the prodigious Inspiration Award at last week's Music Producers Guild awards in London.
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
On my radar: Richard Russell's cultural highlights
Richard Russell was born in London in 1971. He joined XL Recordings in 1991 as an A&R and took over the label several years later, attracting a slew of artists including Dizzee Rascal, MIA and Adele. His parallel career as a producer began in 1992 with rave single The Bouncer and continued in 2010 with I'm New Here, his acclaimed collaboration with Gil Scott-Heron. He has since produced albums by Bobby Womack and Damon Albarn. Russell has just released Temporary, the latest album of his collaborative project Everything Is Recorded, with features from Sampha, Florence Welch, Kamasi Washington and others. Conan O'Brien on Hot Ones Hot Ones is a YouTube series where famous people eat hot wings, which get hotter as the show goes along, and the person being interviewed typically starts to struggle. Conan O'Brien went on it recently and was incredibly funny. He basically hijacks the show and starts pouring hot sauce into his mouth and wiping it on to his nipples. It's a virtuoso performance and an interesting example of someone from a traditional TV chat show coming on a YouTube show and subverting it. I panic-ate a huge bag of crisps while watching. Tyler, the Creator: Chromakopia When someone is a long way ahead musically, it can be more apparent in retrospect than at the time. It's very obvious now that David Bowie was a long way ahead in the 70s and Prince in the 80s. Tyler, the Creator is a long way ahead now. He does all his production himself and there's real depth to the music, even when it's anarchic and bratty. His new album is particularly exciting. I heard the song Sticky on the radio and thought: this is totally different to everything else. Driving around listening to it in LA when the album came out was such a great experience. How to Wreck a Nice Beach by Dave Tompkins This is insanely better than you could possibly imagine it would be. The title is a mishearing of 'How to recognise speech', and the book is the story of the vocoder, the technology for synthesising human speech. It began as military voice-disguise technology but it mangled the words quite a bit, which is why you get these misheard phrases. Then it filtered out into the music world via artists such as Roger Troutman and Zapp, who were then sampled on Dr Dre records. Tompkins is an incredible writer: poetic and a bit oblique but also very funny. Napping Napping is a bit frowned upon – are you elderly? Lazy? Unproductive? – but this is missing the point. The nap is an aid to productivity. By mid-afternoon you need a break, and the best way to have a break is to lie still, with your phone timer, for 20 minutes. I've found that it gives me a lot of energy. It's also incredibly helpful if you've got jet lag. At work I've got a daybed dedicated to the purpose, but if I'm working somewhere else, the floor will do. Just don't do it for much longer than 20 minutes or you'll feel wiped out. Cecil Court, London WC2 This narrow pedestrianised street, just off Charing Cross Road, is a bit of an oasis in the busiest part of London. It's full of antiquarian bookshops, including Watkins, which has been going for more than 130 years and has an amazingly deep inventory over two floors. If you want a book on anything to do with spiritual or occult matters, it's got it. I also like Tenderbooks, which has a more modern feel and specialises in books on art and music. I love Cecil Court. It's a fascinating street and a very special part of London. The Coffee Plant, Portobello Road, London W11 I've been going to this independent coffee shop for years and it has the best coffee. Well, it definitely has the strongest. When I have a coffee there, I really know about it afterwards, which is not always the case. You glimpse Portobello Road at its best here, just because there are always interesting people inside. It has changed hands recently, but I feel like the new owner has maintained the spirit of it. It's quite scruffy, although the toilet has been redone recently, which is a big event. We refer to it as Beyoncé's Bathroom now.
New York Times
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Want to Talk About Loss? For This Label Head's Album, Many Stars Did.
At the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the English music producer Richard Russell realized how many conversations he was having about mortality and loss. Russell owns the label XL Recordings, whose roster has included Radiohead and Adele. He also makes his own studio albums, with widely assorted collaborators, under the rubric Everything Is Recorded. With permission, he started recording the death-haunted discussions. Those voices would find their way into the opening track and shape the overarching theme of the third Everything Is Recorded album, 'Temporary,' due Friday. The songs materialize in a soundscape that mingles past and present, new performances and vintage samples. The lyrics reflect on grief, separation, regrets and memories, but also on survivorship — on what comes afterward. 'I didn't want to make a miserable record,' Russell, 53, said via video from the Copper House, his studio in London, where many of the conversations and most of the album were recorded. 'It's not meant to be that. It's meant to be joyous, and it was quite joyous to make it. 'In a way it's about loss,' he continued. 'But it's about how to be all right with loss, how to accept it, how to embrace it, to not resist it. Obviously, music can be a huge part of that. Music is one of the things that can provide genuine solace.' Wearing an olive-drab T-shirt, Russell gave a virtual tour of the main studio, a brick-walled space with synthesizers, mixers, an upright piano and an old-fashioned recording console. A wooden wall sculpture from India hung overhead, adding color as well as sound diffusion for live recording. It's a carving of birds; the album begins and ends with bird songs. 'There's a nice Gil Scott-Heron lyric in the song 'I Think I'll Call It Morning,'' he noted, referring to an older track, 'where he says, 'Birds got something to teach us all about being free.'' Russell has had the career trajectory of a committed, crate-digging music fan. 'I mostly see myself as a non-musician,' he said. 'I try to make that a strength. I'm not a virtuoso player of any instrument, but I like to be involved and to facilitate people to do stuff. And I'm not afraid of getting things wrong.' In the 1980s and early 1990s, he worked at record stores in England and the United States, including a stint at the New York City dance-music epicenter Vinylmania. He was a D.J. and party promoter in England during the rave movement's idealistic heyday. He learned to use sampling to produce tracks, and in 1992 he had a Top 10 single in England, 'The Bouncer,' with Kicks Like a Mule, his duo with a founder of the XL label, Nick Halkes. Russell moved to the business side of music as an A&R scout, and in 1994 he became the head of XL Recordings. With a roster that, through the decades, included the Prodigy, the White Stripes, Vampire Weekend and FKA twigs, XL has lived up to Russell's stated ambition: to merge — as he wrote in 'Liberation Through Hearing,' his 2020 memoir — 'artistic otherness and commercial savvy.' While the label thrived, Russell decided not to expand too far. He decreed that XL would only release five albums a year. 'It's anti-business. It's anti-growth,' he said. 'It was the realization for me that this thing will lose what it has if it starts doing too much stuff.' In the 2010s, Russell moved back into production. He signed longtime American musicians that he admired — Scott-Heron and Bobby Womack — to make what would be their last studio albums. Construction had already begun on the Copper House when, in 2013, Russell was immobilized with a severe case of an autoimmune disease, Guillain-Barré syndrome, that left him paralyzed and then bedridden for months of recovery. 'That experience of not being able to do stuff, of being incapacitated, and then being able to do everything again was an incredible gift,' he said. 'It really gave me pleasure in small things, like being able to walk up to Portobello Road and get a coffee with my dog.' While day-to-day operations at XL continued in trusted hands, Russell produced albums by Ibeyi, a duo of twin sisters born in France to a Cuban father and a French-Venezuelan mother, and began assembling material for Everything Is Recorded, which released its first album in 2018. He also gathered musicians at the Copper House for extended, free-form, seasonal jams to mark solstices and equinoxes, which he then edited and reshaped into song-length tracks that he released free on Bandcamp. 'With record-making, there's the childlike stage — the mess-making — and then there's the grown-up stage, the tidying up,' he said. 'I enjoy both of those parts. In the first stage, there's no boundaries. But in the second stage I'm trying to be absolutely creatively acute. There's a sort of ruthlessness to that. Like, what's really necessary here?' Jah Wobble, who played bass in Public Image Ltd. and many subsequent projects, anchored the 'Autumn Equinox' jams and appears on 'Temporary.' For him, Russell's Copper House sessions were a happy throwback. 'You're sitting in a room, you're chatting, the other musicians are very nice,' he said. 'There's a nice balance between men and women, so it's not a macho kind of vibe. You play for a long time, but it's just fun, it's kind of meditational. There's not really any sort of crude, crass direction. 'It allows everything to happen in its own time,' he continued. 'No one records like that anymore that I know of. It's kind of a psychedelic, '60s kind of mentality. There's a desire to get away from hierarchies and boundaries, so there's a state of flow, a state of flux.' The first two Everything Is Recorded albums were grounded in riffs and electronic rhythms that echoed Russell's formative years, when punk, hip-hop, reggae and dance music converged. Back then, he said, 'There was no interest in the past. It was all just, like, forward! I think that was very optimistic. It was like, 'Technology, great! What could go wrong?'' But on 'Temporary,' Russell vastly expands his time frame, drawing on samples from a more distant past: folk-rooted sounds from Jackson C. Frank and Molly Drake, 1960s soul from Camille Yarbrough and gospel from Edna Gallmon Cooke. The album features some of Russell's previous Everything Is Recorded collaborators, among them the rapper Berwyn, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington and the doleful, liquid-voiced singer and songwriter Sampha, who has worked on all three albums. 'A lot of the process is us jamming and Richard editing and notating things,' Sampha said in a phone interview. 'Sometimes he'll show me music and I'll just freestyle over something very quickly. And then I'll come back, like, a couple of months later and he'll show me something: 'Remember this?'' Samantha Morton, the Oscar-nominated English actress, writer and director, made a soul-baring 2024 album with Russell, 'Daffodils & Dirt,' and also appears on 'Temporary.' In a phone interview, Morton said that working with Russell was 'like when you're dancing with somebody and you both know the steps. And it's really weird because you haven't rehearsed any of the dance moves, but you're able to not tread on each other's toes. We seem to speak the same language without identifying what language we're speaking.' Other contributors on 'Temporary' include Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, the saxophonist and songwriter Alabaster DePlume, the trad-rock singer Maddy Prior (delivering 'Ether,' a song with lyrics by Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend) and the sepulchral-voiced indie-rock songwriter Bill Callahan in a remote duet — using Callahan's iPhone voice-memo vocals and guitar — with Noah Cyrus. In a video interview, Callahan recalled that Russell asked, ''Is there anyone that you would like to write a song for?' I said, 'Noah Cyrus.' And he was, like, 'I'll see what I can do.'' Russell also asked Callahan for a second track, requesting 'an a cappella song about loss.' Callahan supplied 'Norm,' a tribute to the comedian Norm MacDonald, who died in 2021. A friend who heard it suggested, ''Well, you should do a whole record like this,'' Callahan said. 'And then I said that to Richard. And he was like, 'Let's do it.' Now it's up to me to send a cappella songs.' In 'Norm,' Callahan sings, 'Voice and face live on / Norm's gone'; Russell added excerpts from MacDonald's performances. Much of 'Temporary' comes across as a dialogue between the living and the dead. In packaging the album, Russell had portraits made of both the sampled performers and the ones he recorded, displaying them side by side. On 'Temporary,' recording is a step toward immortality. 'This must have always been, from when people started making marks on cave walls,' Russell said. 'It must be in our DNA. People are just relentless in wanting to make things, and it has now become very apparent that the stuff lasts longer than the people. Maybe that's why it's such an important part of human existence to make art.'
