Fans of Talking Heads and David Byrne can rejoice, as the 73-year-old singer announced his first new album in seven years and tour.
The album “Who Is the Sky?” will hit streaming services and shelves on Sept. 5. Soon after, Byrne will kick off the North American leg of his tour, which features two shows in November at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. In 2026, he’ll touch down in New Zealand before moving on to Australia and Europe.
The 12-song album is led by the single “Everybody Laughs,” released Tuesday alongside a music video directed by multimedia artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo.
“Someone I know said, ‘David, you use the word “everybody” a lot.’ I suppose I do that to give an anthropological view of life in New York as we know it,” Byrne said in a press release.
“Everybody lives, dies, laughs, cries, sleeps and stares at the ceiling. Everybody’s wearing everybody else’s shoes, which not everybody does, but I have done. I tried to sing about these things that could be seen as negative in a way balanced by an uplifting feeling from the groove and the melody, especially at the end, when St. Vincent and I are doing a lot of hollering and singing together,” he added. “Music can do that — hold opposites simultaneously.”
New York-based ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra arranged the album. It also includes collaborations with the aforementioned St. Vincent, Hayley Williams, and the Smile drummer Tom Skinner. Byrne’s last album was 2018’s “American Utopia,” which eventually took the Broadway stage and in 2020 became a concert film directed by Spike Lee.
But it wasn’t a Byrne tour that fans were expecting.
Talking Heads, for which Byrne served as lead singer between 1975 and 1991, released a teaser on June 2, including their song “Psycho Killer.” Some even noticed that the date included in the short clip, June 5, is an important one in the band’s history.
“The band played their first gig as Talking Heads — opening for the Ramones at the CBGB club — on June 5, 1975,” one fan commented.
Instead of a tour announcement, fans received a music video for the song, highlighted by the appearance of Irish actor Saoirse Ronan.
“They waited until Saoirse Ronan was born to make the video,” another fan joked. “Very professional.”
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