After announcing their return with ‘We’re Coming Back’, Titus Andronicus have detailed a brand new album: The Will to Live is out September 30 via Merge Records. The band’s Patrick Stickles co-produced the follow-up to 2019’s An Obelisk with Canadian producer Howard Bilerman at his hotel2tango studio in Montreal. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the new single ‘(I’m) Screwed’, alongside a music video from director Ray Concepcion. Check it out below and scroll down for the album cover and tracklist.
“In ‘(I’m) Screwed,’ we are introduced to the narrator of The Will to Live at the moment he realises the walls are closing in,” Stickles explained in a statement. “Be it real or imagined, he feels the pressure building on all sides, a feeling to which many of us can relate, I imagine. His faith and fortitude are tested like never before, and the narrative of the album will reveal whether that pressure crushes him or produces a diamond.”
The Will to Live was created partly as an attempt to process the 2021 death of Matt “Money” Miller, a founding member of Titus Andronicus and Stickles’ closest cousin. “Certain recent challenges, some unique to myself and some we have all shared, but particularly the passing of my dearest friend, have forced me to recognise not only the precious and fragile nature of life, but also the interconnectivity of all life,” Stickles said, continuing:
Loved ones we have lost are really not lost at all, as they, and we still living, are all component pieces of a far larger continuous organism, which both precedes and succeeds our illusory individual selves, united through time by (you guessed it) the will to live. Recognition of this self-evident truth demands that we extend the same empathy and compassion we would wish for ourselves outward to every living creature, even to those we would label our enemies, for we are all cells in the same body, sprung from a common womb, devoted to the common cause of survival.
Naturally, though, our long-suffering narrator can only arrive at this conclusion through a painful and arduous odyssey through Hell itself – this is a Titus Andronicus record, after all.
The Will to Live Cover Artwork:
The Will to Live Tracklist:
1. My Mother is Going to Kill Me
2. (I’m) Screwed
3. I Can Not Be Satisfied
4. Bridge and Tunnel
5. Grey Goo
6. Dead Meat
7. An Anomaly
8. Give Me Grief
9. Baby Crazy
10. All Through the Night
11. We’re Coming Back
12. 69 Stones
