Moby Announces New Album for 2018, Releases First Single ‘Like a Motherless Child’
Moby is making plans to return with his 15th studio album in early 2018.
Titled Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, the new LP has reportedly been described by the artist as a return to the gospel and blues-influenced trip-hop style that fueled Moby's massively popular 1999 outing, Play. Due in stores March 2, the album is available to pre-order now; fans who purchase the digital edition will receive an instant download of the set's first single, "Like a Motherless Child."
Moby has also already released a video for "Like a Motherless Child," which you can stream above; elsewhere on his YouTube channel, he's uploaded a playlist of "album inspirations" for the new LP, giving fans a series of early clues to its musical direction that include cuts by Grace Jones, Marianne Faithfull, and Soul Makossa. You can stream that playlist here.
Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt arrives in the midst of a flurry of activity for Moby, who released These Systems Are Failing in 2016 and followed it up earlier this year with More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse. As he told Billboard, his aesthetic for the new LP was inspired partly by exploring the Spotify catalog as a "nostalgia machine," coming to understand that — as he put it — "the more perfect a piece of music, the less I like it."
That realization contributed to the construction of a slightly off-kilter sound. "I’m not such a great producer, so it’s pretty easy for me to create imperfections," he explained. "But I also liked the idea: in this world where so many people are striving for some weird ostensible idea of technical perfection, I just wanted to make something that was a little more broken. "
Moby, 'Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt' Track Listing
"Mere Anarchy"
"The Waste of Suns"
"Like a Motherless Child"
"The Last of Goodbyes"
"The Ceremony of Innocence"
"The Tired and the Hurt"
"Welcome to Hard Times"
"The Sorrow Tree"
"Falling Rain and Light"
"The Middle is Gone"
"This Wild Darkness"
"A Dark Cloud Is Coming"