Hadouken new album Music For An Accelerated Culture

25-04-2008 14:17

Grimey punk diy'ers Hadouken! mark the release of their debut album, ‘Music For An Accelerated Culture’, with a series of free live shows and signing sessions at stores up and down the country.6 shows during a tour week is no mean feat. To be a part of the action head to one of the stores below on the date and time listed.If you’ve yet to experience the live show … don’t fret … this will be no cheap imitation …. Sunday May 4th Zavvi Oxford Circus 4pm
Monday 5th May Manchester Market Street HMV 4.30pm
Tuesday May 6th Birmingham High Street HMV 4.30pm
Wednesday 7th May Sheffield High Street HMV 4.30pm
Thursday 8th May Fopp The Frontage, Queen Street Nottingham 4.30pm
Friday 9th May Leeds Headrow HMV 4.30pm
After each live performance the band will be in the store to meet fans and sign copies of the new CD released that week.
‘Music For An Accelerated Culture’ features the singles, ‘That Boy That Girl’, ‘Liquid Lives’ and 'Declaration Of War'.Looking for a band who sum up the genre-vaulting, scene-splicing, boundary-pushing spirit of music in 2008? A band who can skip between grime, emo, drum’n’bass and euphoric rave in the space of a single chorus? A band whose very existence causes division between trad-rock bores and the youthful, enthusiastic, attention-hopping minds of a younger generation (not to mention the music press)? Then you need look no further than Hadouken!, a band who’ve spent the last two years surfing the cutting edge of the music scene and carving up opinion, armed with enough sonic ideas to make your common-or-garden indie band run for cover.

Following the release of their USB-only ‘Not Here To Please You’ Mixtape in November 2007, and after months of hardcore grafting in the studio, Hadouken! are, readying themselves to release their debut album proper. ‘Music For An Accelerated Culture’, will be released on May 5th 2008. A dazzling 11-track journey through indie, dubstep, grime, hardcore, acid house, and UK punk, consider it a defining statement - the dovetailing, myriad-influenced sound of 2008. They represent the mix’n’match, guilt-free, plunder-all, try anything approach to music that will surely stamp its mark on this decade.

‘Music For An Accelerated Culture’ is about as forward-thinking as you can get – on more than one level. Musically, it rounds up Hadouken’s! vanguard buffeting, inescapably futuristic, now signature style. Raw urbanity married with razor sharp lyrical dissection of the day to day, of social ills, defines a generation as their heroes The Prodigy and The Streets (both of which are fans of the band) did before them. From the anthemic, ‘yoof’-defining ‘Liquid Lives’ to the brilliantly in-yer-face, catchy high energy of ‘Game Over’, the sonic monster of ‘Crank It Up’ and of course the ruthless future smash of the Jack Knife Lee (U2, Bloc Party) produced first single ‘Declaration Of War’, their album is one of the most stimulating, vibrant, nay seminal debuts to have surfaced in years.

Last year, as critics frantically tried to compartmentalise them as “new rave” or “grindie”, each record Hadouken! unleashed felt like a swerve towards a new direction. And so it follows that, just when people were starting to get used to the Leeds five-piece as purveyors of fun (poking) indie floor-fillers, along comes an album with persistently fresh production, and a hard-hitting, modern-social-ill-stalking, sinister undercurrent.

Name checking Douglas Coupland’s seminal novel Generation X (whose subtitle is ‘Tales For An Accelerated Culture’) was a meaningful choice:- “After we’d written the album we were looking for a unifying link between the tracks and it became clear they were all separate stories and that a lot of them had a morality to them,” says James Smith, vocalist and the band’s lead man.

And so, underpinning the humorous snapshots of Booze Britain in ‘Liquid Lives’ is a very serious and insistent message about a disenchanted generation of alcopop-splattered youth. ‘Wait For You’, meanwhile, is a disturbing tale of stalker-proportion obsession set against dark production. And whereas a track like ‘Get Smashed Gate Crash’ might, on the surface, seem to be about trashing a house party in archetypal Skins style, the underlying issue is rooted in a sense of inescapable responsibility.

Always ahead of the pack, it’s not just their music displaying boundary-breaking tendencies. Hadouken’s! debut has a technical trick up it’s sleeve – something only hardcore fans of the band will be in on. As with their 2007 Mixtape, which was the first USB-only release, Hadouken! are pushing the limits of formats once again, with 1) a special limited edition box-set edition of the album, containing extras including DVD material and illustrated lyrics. It’ll be numbered and signed by the band, and available exclusively from www.hadouken.co.uk. Fans who purchase the limited box set will instantly become part of AERIALS, an exclusive community with exclusive access to a vat of Hadouken! music, free tickets, special merchandise and discounts, as well as regular contact with the band themselves. Most importantly though, members of Aerials will get 2) a high quality download of the album, just under TWO WEEKS before it hits the High Street, or indeed iTunes – April 24th versus the official May 5th release date.

The last year of Hadouken’s! hectic ascension to the top flight saw them blow packed Radio 1 tents away at Reading and Leeds festivals, rocking sold-out crowds touring across the UK on 30-date tour (culminating in a blistering show at London’s Astoria), and building an insanely devoted online fanbase (88,000 myspace friends and counting), whilst simultaneously inspiring a range of DIY clothing, demolishing a million and one pigeonholes, and growing into one of the most forward-thinking bands in the country. Not bad for a band who are only just getting round to releasing their debut album. With a year of BIG plans stretched before them, and a definitive, movement-shaping album now under their collective belts, for Hadouken!, this is just the beginning…Hadouken