While he certainly hasn’t been keeping himself out of the limelight, it’s been a minute since we heard from Wally De Backer as his singing, songwriting, producing, and hit-making alter ego Gotye.
Well fans now have reason to celebrate as De Backer is reportedly working on a new Gotye album, which will reportedly be a concept record dedicated to pioneers in the field of electronic music.
Speaking recently on Double J, Australian singer-songwriter Lior, De Backer’s mate and the station’s latest Artist In Residence, dropped the big news that the songwriter is working on a follow-up to 2011’s Making Mirrors.
“I just saw Wally a couple of weeks ago actually,” Lior told listeners, as he introduced ‘State of the Art’, a song from Making Mirrors dedicated to the vintage Cotillion organ.
According to Lior, he recently linked up with De Backer overseas and got the inside scoop on his new music, which will apparently follow on from the style displayed on ‘State of the Art’.
“He’s living in New York now and he’s currently working on a concept album – which sort of follows the line of this track – looking at electronic music and pioneers of electronic music and dedicating a song to some of those pioneers,” he said.
“And stylistically [‘State Of The Art’] was cited as being [closest] to the style of the music that he’s working on at the moment.” As triple j notes, it’s the first update we’ve received from Gotye in a long time.
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Most recently, De Backer has been busying himself with his band, The Basics. The trio unveiled their latest album, The Age Of Entitlement, last month, which the band kindly took Tone Deaf readers through track-by-track.
De Backer told triple j late last year that he’d also been keeping busy trekking the globe “just digging around in odd places for strange sounds”, spending time in Switzerland, Canada, and parts of the US.
By the sounds of things, the follow-up to Making Mirrors, which spawned the mega-hit ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’, is still in its incubation period, but you can catch the man himself on stage when he hits the road with The Basics this October.
Whatever the case, the latest Gotye news is certainly more promising than his own update almost a year ago, when he told fans that “There will be no new Gotye music.” He later relented, stating that he’s “not entirely sure right now”.
