we all die young

The new Decemberists album, I'll Be Your Girl, was released today. I listened to it on Spotify and was very pleased. It feels like new life and new focus after the self-indulgent, self-referential stagnation of What A Wonderful World, What A Terrible World. I was very dubious about the dance-y, synthesizer-driven new sound that kept being talked about in interviews and promotions, but they still sound like the Decemberists. If anything, the changes make their sound harder and less poppy than it's been in a while. The album is also a lot more explicitly political than I can ever remember them being before. It's very much a "surviving/resisting Trump's America" sort of thing, with lots of rage and despair, ironic examinations of the urge to just give up and hide, and a few glimmers of hope. Plus there's still a good dose of everyone's my favorite Decemberists thing, which is folk-song-influenced pieces in which everyone dies.