Moby Collaborates With Wayne Coyne, Mark Lanegan & More On New Album

Ever since his world dominating 1999 album Play, vegan electronic music maker Moby has been a household name, 20 million in album sales certainly couldn’t hurt either, but for the latest entry in his discography, the artist born Henry Melville Hall is sharing the spotlight with an impressive list of musical collaborators.

Innocents is Moby’s eleventh studio album and follows on from his 2011 album Destroyed and for the first time in his career, saw him working with an outside producer on his new LP, longtime friend and Grammy Award winning Mark ‘Spike’ Stent, whose high profile CV includes work with some of music’s biggest and most respected names; including Madonna, U2, Muse, Coldplay, Björk, and Massive Attack.

Recorded over a period of 18 months, mostly from Moby’s own New York apartment with Stent, Innocents features collaborations with The Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne (on ‘The Perfect Life’), Cold Specks – who appears on two tracks, indie folk luminary Damien Jurado (on ‘Almost Home’), Destroyed singer Inyang Bassey (on ‘Don’t Love Me’), and on ‘The Last Day’, Skylar Grey, the co-writer and performer on Eminem and Rihanna’s ‘Love the Way You Lie.’

“I spend most of my time alone in my studio, so for Innocents it seemed like a really nice idea to involve other people in the making of the record,” says Moby. “Working with all of these collaborators has helped me to make a record that I’m very proud of, and working this way also gave me some semblance of a social life.” “I spend most of my time alone in my studio, so for Innocents it seemed like a really nice idea to involve other people in the making of the record.” – Moby

The album also includes Moby’s surprise Record Store Day collaboration with the gravelly voiced Mark Lanegan, ‘The Lonely Night’. “He has one of the best and most distinctive voices of the last 25 years,” Moby said originally of the release with the Screaming Trees and sometimes QOTSA vocalist. “Now that we live near each other it ended up being really easy working on a song together,” he continues. “In producing the song, Spike Stent and I incorporated some very unusual production techniques.”

Stent, typically known for blockbuster mixes and production scaled back his widescreen approach to align with Moby’s commitment to more analogue, lo-fi style for the new album extending to using outdated and dysfunctional equipment. An approach influenced by the themes of the album, “embracing human vulnerability and the desire for human connection, while celebrating imperfection in a world that too often esteems unrealistic and artificial perfection,” according to Moby.

Innocents finds Moby harkening back to his formative years, applying antiquated music and outdated sounds with an electronic method of construction and looping, with Moby pointing towards ‘Natural Blues’, from the 12 million plus selling Play, as an example of the new record.

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The Mark Lanegan-featuring ‘The Lonely Night’ has already offered a taste of Innocents, but the official lead single comes in ‘A Case For Shame’ featuring Cold Specks and is available digitally now; the tune’s cycling piano and dinky syrupy strings have Moby’s distinctive touch and certainly recall his blockbuster Play.

You can listen to the new single below as well as view the tracklisting. Innocents is out Warner Music Australia on 27th September.

Innocents Tracklisting