Shad Announces New Album 'TAO'

Check out the record's latest single "Storm"

BY Brock ThiessenPublished Jun 22, 2021

Shad has been teasing his new album with a few track drops, and now the Canadian artist is finally pulling back the curtain on his TAO.

Shad's upcoming album will arrive on October 1 via Secret City Records. TAO will mark his first album since 2018's A Short Story About a War.

"'Storm' is a feeling," Shad said in a statement. "The feeling of a flood of memories. In the same way that a storm is the result of forces that gather strength quietly, often invisibly over time — this song is meant to hold a sense of the same sort of process as it relates to the storms in our lives and the storms in our world. The way storms can build up almost imperceptibly in our individual and collective unconscious. The song touches on a range of personal and political storms, both good and bad, through a range of voices, but most importantly it sees them all as inextricably tied."

You can check "Storm," which has arrived alongside a video, for yourself below.

TAO will be Shad's sixth studio album, and it apparently comes as the result of a simple concept: an image of a circle.

Here's how Shad explains it:

I'm still very much an album artist — I need some kind of overarching idea to really get me going as a writer. And the thing that inspired this record was this image in my mind of a circle, but it's getting fragmented, and then those fragmented pieces start floating away from each other. That felt to me like a picture of what's happening to us individually and collectively. We tend to view ourselves as being sort of composed of different parts — our work-life being a major one these days, also our bodies and our physical health being another, our spiritual side, our relationship to the natural environment being yet another, our relationship to the past and to our inner child, etc. It seemed to me that what was once a more integrated whole self has become fragmented into these various pieces, and each of those pieces seems to be in some kind of crisis. That's been on my mind for a while.

Other pre-release album track include "Out of Touch"  and "Work."


TAO:

1. Out of Touch
2. GOD
3. Work
4. TAO Pt 1
5. Slot Machines
6. Slow
7. Body (No Reason)
8. Storm
9. TAO Pt 2
10. Black Averageness
11. Garçon
12, TAO Pt 3

Pre-order TAO.

Shad 2021 Tour Dates:

07/22 Calgary, AB - Calgary Folk Fest
08/27 Toronto, ON - City View Drive-In *

* with Skratch Bastid, Haviah Mighty, K-os and re.verse
 

Tour Dates

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