Spoon Releases New Single ‘No Bullets Spent’

Praise For ‘Hot Thoughts’

‘They have nothing to prove, but you wouldn’t know that from the 10 songs here: Hot Thoughts is loaded with tunes, invention and adventure’ – The Guardian 5*

‘Hot Thoughts finds Spoon at the peak of their considerable powers, their ninth album effortlessly unfolding and revealing its mysteries as they cement their place in the firmament of undeniably great rock bands.’ – Uncut 8/10

 ‘Even at their most traditional, the Austin band subvert expectations.’ – Sunday Times Culture

‘Spoon are a band who are impossible to second-guess, and one deserving of much more attention.’ –  Q 4*

‘Spoon offer a pretty good portrait of the indie band in middle age; more accomplished and less earnest than in youth but still with the invention, quirkiness and rebelliousness that made students relate to them in the first place.’ – The Times 4*

Austin’s most esteemed rock ambassadors, Spoon, today unleash the band’s first new song since 2017’s acclaimed Hot Thoughts.  “No Bullets Spent” showcases Spoon in full creative forward momentum, with its staccato rhythms and spooky film-noir guitar.  The inimitable vocals of magnetic frontman Britt Daniel kicking off at the first note, Spoon’s signature is stamped on the track immediately while another level is achieved in Daniels’ seemingly infinite hot streak as a songwriter.  Blending with the percussion wizardry of Spoon co-founder Jim Eno, the song is propelled from the doors of his own Public Hi Fi studio in Austin, TX and is produced by Mark Rankin.  Alex Fischel (keyboard) and Gerardo Larios (guitar) add their own dimension to the band whose recent recording sessions point to, perhaps, a forthcoming new album.

Listen to ‘No Bullets Spent’ HERE

“No Bullets Spent” joins classics from the Spoon catalog on Everything Hits at Once: The Best of Spoon, the greatest hits compilation coming out July 26th on Matador Records.

“No Bullets Spent” will also be available as a limited edition 7”, with the A Series of Sneaks era rarity “Shake It Off” on the B-side.  Limited to a small pressing worldwide, the 7” will be sold exclusively via the Matador and Spoon webstores and on tour with the band this summer.  The album’s tracklist (complaints about what songs are missing can be directed to the Twitter ether) and Spoon’s full list of summer tour dates can be found below the physical and digital artwork, and the Rob Sheffield-penned bio.

How many rock bands from the past 25 years could get away with a greatest-hits album? Spoon stand alone, with a career-spanning retrospective culled from all over their unique songbook. It’s a flawless compilation of their best-known, best-loved tunes, yet it’s still full of surprises—the only thing you could expect from a band that’s spent their whole career taking people by surprise.

“The idea of doing a best-of came to us a couple times,” Britt Daniel says. “First I wasn’t sure how I felt about it but at some point I remembered that when I got my first Cure record it was Standing on a Beach. When I got my first New Order record, it was Substance. That was how I met those bands, and I moved backwards from there but I still listen to those comps. I love a greatest hits LP when it’s done well. It can be a thing unto itself.”

If you were the betting type in 1996, and you were taking odds on which bands would still be on top of their game in 2019—still thriving, creating, evolving, sitting on top of a catalog so rich it could produce a compilation like this—it’s safe to say you could have bought a house betting a quarter on Spoon. They did not seem the likeliest band to make history. Yet they’ve achieved this by refusing to concede a thing to fashion, refusing to pander, declining to repeat themselves, resisting the impulse to play it safe. When they dropped Kill the Moonlight in 2002, it already seemed bizarre this underdog band had turned out to be so freakishly prolific and creative. But Spoon were just getting started. They have kept going their own way, moving past their original blueprint and building something new one album at a time.

When you hear Spoon has a greatest-hits record, you instantly think of your pet favorites. Every fan would assemble a totally different lineup—that’s the beauty of it. They’ve built the kind of ridiculously vast catalog where people love to argue for hours over their favorite highlights. Are you a Girls Can Tell diehard or a Transference cultist? Do you prefer Gimme Fiction or Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga? Hot Thoughts? They Want My Soul?

Certain artists like Al Green, Blondie or Creedence spend years making individual albums that stand up as fully realized works of art—but they spawn a perfect greatest-hits record that makes its own statement. That’s the classic level Spoon are on here. So how did this complex and diverse string of albums boil down to one disc? “Honestly, it was a struggle,” Daniel says. “I was listening to the old records and jotting down the songs—if you wanna turn the volume up, that’s a good sign. The list really got whittled down, so these are the best. ‘I Summon You’ was never a huge song, wasn’t for the radio, but it had to be on there. It’s one of the best things we’ve done. I wanted to represent Transference, even though it’s not really a ‘hit’ type of album—‘Got Nuffin’ was the closest thing. It did get to a point where I started feeling like, ‘We gotta represent this album in some way, we’ve gotta represent this change in some way.’ ‘Everything Hits at Once’ was a turning point for us—a minimal new wave soul type of rock song.’”

That’s part of what makes this a classic greatest-hits album—we will keep arguing over the selections for years to come. “It’s a small collection trying to cover a lot of years, but I hope it does what The Singles record by the Pretenders or Hot Rocks did for me—cover a lot of ground and then if you want to find out more, you can find out more.” It’s a conversation starter, like any great group’s best-of should be.  But it’s also a map to the work of a band that’s still full of surprises—and more yet to come.

Tracklisting:

1. I Turn My Camera On
2. Do You
3. Don’t You Evah
4. Inside Out
5. The Way We Get By
6. The Underdog
7. Hot Thoughts
8. I Summon You
9. Rent I Pay
10.  You Got Yr Cherry Bomb
11. Got Nuffin
12. Everything Hits At Once
13. No Bullets Spent

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