13 & God continues to excite us with new music off their return record, Own Your Ghost, out May 17 on Anticon (US) and Alien Transistor (EU) on May 5. From what’s online so far, the return of 13 & God hikes into full-throttle pop song territory that The Notwist had barely fringed — songs that come of a unified band with diverse membership. Here’s a little backstory to how Themselves and The Notwist crossed paths (via Alien Transistor):
After a pleasantly doomed North American tour, an impressive bus fire, and the Notwist’s sprawling take on themselves’ “Out in the Open†(for The No Music of Aiffs remix album), the two entities
[Themselves and the Notwist] were inextricably entangled. It only made sense that a onetime punk band turned experimental woodwinded electronic rock-pop group should fall for an ex-battle rapper with a penchant for layered poetry and otherworldly melody (Adam), an SP1200 beatsmith who’s rewritten the rules of sample-based music (Jeff), and their newfound keyboard-playing friend (Dax). Both groups have a rich history of genre-bending collaboration (see Subtle and cLOUDDEAD for themselves, Lali Puna and Village of Savoonga for the Notwist); the fact that their music is so different only made everything more necessary.And if you’re reading this, it might be a ticklish surprise to you that on a recent tour, Bon Iver’s S. Carey covered “Consequence,” the more delicate love song that pulls at the heartstrings of any nerdy Notwist fan like myself. I know, it sounds too good to be true — and though a friend who saw S. Carey in NYC assured that it happened, I had to see it to believe it:
