Fresh off dazzling thousands of fans last weekend while headlining his own two-day festival at Under the K Bridge Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden has re-teamed with guitarist William Tyler for 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s, a full-length album follow-up to their 2023 single Darkness, Darkness.
The seven-track project will be released Sept. 19 through Temporary Residence Ltd. and is led by an 11-minute cover of Lyle Lovett’s “If I Had a Boat,” which can be sampled below.
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Hebden and Tyler met at the 2013 edition of the Bonnaroo festival and made Darkness, Darkness remotely, but in early 2022, they gathered at a Los Angeles studio where Floating Points had just completed his acclaimed album with Pharoah Sanders, Promises.
“We discussed references for an album and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Fennesz and AM oldies radio stations came up,” Hebden recalls. “But the main influence was found when we discovered a shared deep connection to ‘80s American country and folk music – artists like Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith and Joe Ely. My father was a huge fan of this sound and through my teenage years I heard this music most days and was taken to see loads of performances. The guitar player David Grissom made a huge impact on me as a kid learning to play. It’s not an influence that I usually mention, but it’s in there more than I realize and must have helped me develop my sound and ideas.
“It turns out that William’s father was working in Nashville as a songwriter during this period and actually knew people like David Grissom,” he continues “So, William had grown up with this music as well and knew all the stuff that I was talking about and we both felt that it had shaped our styles. Our idea for the album was to make music that focused on that influence and brought it to the front of our awareness. We’d record the guitars in the studio, exploring styles and sounds from that music, and then I’d take it all home to my computer and bring it into my other world.”
Hebden spent “almost two years doing the computer bit of the album and sometimes sent stuff back over to William who added more overdubs and ideas in response. On some tracks, all that’s left of the guitars are digital fragments of sound making rhythmic textures. Taking it slowly allowed us to create a new sound out of this shared teenage experience and gift from our fathers.”
While he and Hebden initially “bonded over a mutual love of a lot of late ‘90s post rock,” Tyler says he was “kinda shocked (in the best way) that [Hebden] was so versed in ‘80s Americana. Not so much my world, but definitely a world I grew up around. I never thought that a connection with someone like Kieran would end up coming down to both of our dads and their mutual love of a certain kind of music. I grew up in Nashville, he grew up in London. But we heard things the same way, I think.”
When it came to actually make music together in the same room, Tyler “never really thought, oh, we’re gonna have this album done by a certain point. I just knew that when Kieran felt like it was done, it would be done. I think we both in our own specific ways want to recontextualize a lot of music that we grew up with, regardless of the genre, and I think that’s what this album reflects. It’s a lot of nostalgia but it’s also very forward-focused. I don’t even know what genre I’m supposed to be in at this point, but I trust Kieran and I love what we’ve done together. He’s become a dear friend and I can’t wait to see what’s ahead for us.”
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