Eels (or EELS, or eels, depending on how they’re feeling for any given album) have announced that their fifteenth studio LP, the jauntily-titled EELS TIME!, will be released on June 7, via E Works/Play It Again Sam. They have also unveiled the lead single from that album, the acoustic track “Time”. (See what they’ve done there? EELS TIME! Eels, “Time”. Very clever.)
As of right now no video is forthcoming, but you can listen to the track here.
Although EELS TIME! is the result of Eels’ first in-person recording session since the beginning of the pandemic, the band gigged extensively throughout 2023, taking their Lockdown Hurricane tour through Europe and North America. They also released the Best Of compilation EELS So Good: Essential EELS, Vol.2 and a brand new track, "Christmas, Why You Gotta Do Me Like This" at the end of last year.
Mark Everett: a singular talent, a singular beard.
Eels is essentially the project of principal singer/songwriter Mark Oliver Everett, aka E. After initially signing to Polydor in 1991 and releasing two albums, A Man Called E and Broken Toy Shop as a solo artist, he met drummer Jonathan “Butch” Norton and bassist Tommy Walter in 1995 and formed Eels.
According to Everett, the name was chosen so that the band’s records would be placed next to his solo output in record stores… and it was only later that he realized he hadn’t taken into account other acts beginning with the letter E.
“I went to the Virgin Megastore and I see the E CDs right at the beginning of the E section,” Everett told the Naked Lunch podcast. “And then there's like, 28 Earth, Wind and Fire [albums], 40 Eagles [albums] – they're nowhere near each other!”
The band’s debut album, 1996’s Beautiful Freak, was an instant success, with the singles “Novocaine for the Soul”, “Susan’s House” and “Your Lucky Day in Hell” all breaking into the U.K. top 40. In 1998 Eels also took home the award for Best International Breakthrough Act at the BRIT Awards.
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Since then, and with what might be called a “fluid” line-up of members, Eels have released a further 13 studio albums and in 2008 Everett published his highly acclaimed book Things the Grandchildren Should Know. That same year he starred in the award-winning Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives documentary about the search to understand his father, Hugh Everett III, the famous physicist and originator of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, who died of a heart attack when Everett was just 19. The documentary won a Royal Television Society award on March 19, 2008.
EELS TIME! follows 2022’s Extreme Witchcraft, recorded remotely during lockdown in collaboration with PJ Harvey’s longtime musical foil John Parish. Check out the tracklisting below. Pre-orders are available here.
'EELS TIME!' is out in June.
EELS Time! tracklist:
01 TIME
02 WE WON’T SEE HER LIKE AGAIN
03 GOLDY
04 SWEET SMILE
05 HAUNTED HERO
06 IF I’M GONNA GO ANYWHERE
07 AND YOU RUN
08 LAY WITH THE LAMBS
09 SONG FOR YOU KNOW WHO
10 I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S TRUE
11 ON THE BRIDGE
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