Phoenix have returned with a new single called ‘Alpha Zulu’. Marking the French group’s first new music in two years, the song follows ‘Identical’, which they contributed to soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks. According to a press release, the title comes from a phrase Thomas Mars heard a pilot repeating over the radio during a flight in a storm. Listen to it below.
In an interview with Apple Music 1, Mars explained:
To me, I’m so scared of flying that it sounds like Mayday when I heard this the first time. Like, “Alpha Zulu, Alpha Zulu, going down.” And so I guess it stuck with me, and it came out in a strange way in the studio. The way we make music is so… It’s really collaborative, and it’s almost like therapy, kind of. And I don’t know what we just did, but also the sense of time felt really strange because we worked on this for a long time during the pandemic. I guess every album that came out recently is a pandemic record, more or less. They all have to be linked to this weird moment in life. I’m not sure when we started, when we stopped, how long we stopped for. But at some point when we were seeing the end of the tunnel, not only the pandemic, sort of, at least we could think, “Oh, there’s going to be a tour.” That was going to be a possibility of this record coming out then. Then it clicked, and all the joyful pieces that we were hoping for, came together and made this record. And you use that time of self-reflection, and you use it, it comes out in the music. So I guess all that time spent not doing anything is somehow coming out on this record. It does something to you.
Phoenix issued their most recent album, Ti Amo, in 2017.
