Ra Ra Riot Reveal 'Need Your Light' LP, Share Track with Rostam Batmanglij

BY Alex HudsonPublished Nov 16, 2015

Indie chamber rock outfit Ra Ra Riot gave themselves an electronic overhaul on 2013's Beta Love, and now they're ushering in the next chapter in their career with a new LP. Need Your Light will be out on February 19 through Barsuk Records.

The 10-song collection was helmed primarily by Ryan Hadlock, who is known as the Lumineers' producer. Additionally, two tracks were produced by Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij.

Batmanglij has previously worked with Ra Ra Riot frontman Wes Miles in the project Discovery. (They released the album LP in 2009.) In a statement, Batmanglij said this about their latest collaboration:

Between 2005-2009, Wes and I wrote an album together in snatched moments in our lives... That record (the Discovery LP) seemed to benefit from us having the freedom to pick it up and put it down. In January of this year, Wes came to stay with me, and we set out to write songs again. We didn't know where it would take us. There was something I'd heard in Wes's singing in the earliest days of seeing Ra Ra Riot live that I felt had never quite been captured on record. There was our shared love of U2's Achtung Baby, something that having listened to the music we've recorded in our lives thus far you might not know about. And also this obsession with writing songs that tell stories. So we spent five days writing just two songs — "Water" and "I Need Your Light" — and I think we found that same freedom in making these songs that we had found years ago making the Discovery record, not knowing where it would take us.

Scroll past the tracklist below to check out a lyric video for one of those Batmanglij-produced cuts, "Water." It's a tunefully grooving synth-pop tune with a hip-hop-tinged beat, and the words pop up against a cloudy background.

Need Your Light:

1. Water
2. Absolutely
3. Foreign Lovers
4. I Need Your Light
5. Bad Times
6. Call Me Out
7. Instant Breakup
8. Every Time I'm Ready to Hug
9. Bouncy Castle
10. Suckers

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