Godspeed You! Black Emperor
"NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD"

“It’s as if the older they get, the more certain Godspeed are that horrors are inevitable, but so is our survival if we do our part to clear away the rubble.” - PITCHFORK Rock Albums of the year #22 

“This album is a call to wrap your deepest self around the enormity at hand. The scars on this earth are real. So is what will grow from them.” - PITCHFORK Best Albums of the Year #27 

“As their instruments bend, coalesce and dance around each other, they demand active, mutual accountability and a deep uncomfortable interrogation of imperial violence and the soft power that supports it.” - EXCLAIM! Best Albums of 2024 #37

“The most unambiguous statement in years from a band whose work feels more vital than ever.” - Flood Albums of the Year #39 

“This album has a heartbreakingly hopeful tone to it, an uplifting current beneath the incalculable weight of reality.” - Campus Times Top 10 Albums of the Year #5

"One of the few western acts to release music that explicitly references the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Musically, this is their strongest set since 2002’s Yanqui UXO. Bold, brave and brilliant." - The Observer ★★★★

“It casts daybreak over Godspeed’s bleakly beautiful world, in which delicate violins dance over swirling gusts of guitar, which are sometimes eerily elegant, melodic, expectant, sometimes building to a pulse-raising wall of noise but always driving the journey onwards…without opening their mouths, they’ve spoken volumes here.” - Classic Rock 7/10

"Thirty years on from their formation, Godspeed remain as elusive and enigmatic an entity as ever, but their messaging has never been more clear: When mere hope isn’t enough to chase the darkness away, go straight for the joy." - Pitchfork 7.8/10

"NO TITLE's music matches the blunt force of its name when it makes room for discomfort. Broadly elegiac, at times even hopeful." - The Wire

"Their latest sees the Montreal group again pushing the limits of what music can mean at times of darkness. Where they find beauty, it is often implacably bright." - MOJO

“Another essential, if discomforting listen.” - UNCUT

"The embodiment of music as art. Removed from corporate influence and conventional song segmentation, Godspeed You! Black Emperor are free to convey a message uncompromised." - The Skinny ★★★★

"GY!BE has been fighting the good fight for three decades, and held on to hope even when it has seemed only a tendril.  Their new album – their finest, most complete recording in years – may not change any hearts or minds, but it will certainly encourage them." - A Closer Listen

“These are the sounds of destruction and despair, a soundtrack for the aftermath.” - MXDWN 

“In a sense, the post-rock titans’ music was made for times like these… a commitment to creation rather than destruction.” - Buzz Mag ★★★★  

“An incredible and emotional gut punch – likely their best since their re-emergence.” - Beats Per Minute 86% 

“Both a documentation of unspeakable evil and a plea for peace and love. It makes no hesitation to speak truth to power, and it does so with no words. Sonically, it is as effective a post-rock masterpiece as anything Godspeed You! Black Emperor has recorded. We can only hope, as we always have, that the next album is recorded and released in a better world.” - Post Trash

“A genuine and wonderful listen, sporting enough sweeping instrumental progressions and ambient magic to satisfy even the most stone-faced of post-rock fans… capture(s) today’s pervading sense of hopelessness.” - Out Of Rage

"A soul-stirring album. It’s very rare for a band to be breaking new ground 30 years after they formed, but Godspeed You! Black Emperor shows us all that it’s possible." - Boolin Tunes 8.5/10

"It is grand and heartbreaking and occasionally even hopeful and ecstatic. There’s still nobody else quite like them." - The Fader

"'No Title As of 13 February 2024, 28,340 Dead' may be an instrumental record, but it stands as the most powerful artistic statement yet on a tragedy history will not forget." - Louder Sound ★★★★

"Like a requiem to the world as it is today, albeit one permeated by rays of occasional light." - Flood Magazine

"Uplifts rather than mourns… inspiring and life-affirming." - All Music

"The sheer importance of such a record is something that demands respect, from the devastating title, to the humane creative ethos that Godspeed You! Black Emperor have employed." - Distorted Sound 9/10 

"Grand, extended pieces where hypnotic, pulsing bass and swirling ambience slowly build into peaks of quite gorgeous, even majestic crescendos." - Ghost Cult 8/10 

"GY!BE give[s] sight to the unseen and voice to the voiceless." - The Blind Spot 

"This album is a triumph from a massively important band that keeps on getting better, surely ready to inspire not just fans, but the next wave of experimental musicians and create memories that are held onto for dear life." - Range 

"Visceral, melancholic, elegiac, and even scary at times…one of their most impressive records to date." - Far Out Magazine ★★★★

"'No Title' has the raw urgency of an album that came together quickly and intuitively, as both a response and a soundtrack to ongoing mass tragedy, and it’s as overpowering as any of Godspeed’s best records." - Brooklyn Vegan

"Somber and solemn, yet still rife with the epic and eerily beautiful quality that’s always been a part of what Godspeed creates." - Treble Zine

"They address depravity head-on and offer something other than desperation, and this nuanced take is something valuable in itself, if only because it makes vulnerability and uncertainty central to our humanity." - FREQ

 "These six powerful tunes come across as a band confronting their contradictions, a stepping out to shape music honestly in response, at times mournful, at others incongruously elevating, provoking sorrow but also resiliently hopeful.” - Backseat Mafia 9/10

"Intense, chaotic, and expansive instrumental rock that feels like it could soundtrack the end of the world." - Slant Magazine

THE PLAIN TRUTH==

we drifted through it, arguing.

every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.

we sat down together and wrote it in one room,

and then sat down in a different room, recording.

NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall; what context?; what broken melody?

and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.

the sun setting above beds of ash

while we sat together, arguing.

the old world order barely pretended to care.

this new century will be crueler still.

war is coming.

don’t give up.

pick a side.

hang on.

love.

GY!BE

PACKAGING NOTES

CREDITS

godspeed you black emperor is/was/is =

Thierry Amar – electric bass + contrebasse
David Bryant – electric guitar + tape loops
Aidan Girt – drums
Timothy Herzog – drums + glockenspiel
Efrim Manuel Menuck – electric guitar + tape loops
Michael Moya – electric guitar
Mauro Pezzente – electric bass
Sophie Trudeau – violin
Karl Lemieux + Philippe Léonard – 16mm film projections

all of it recorded at thee mighty hotelatango winter of bombs 2024.
engineered + mixed by Jace Lasek.
mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market.

front cover photo by Stacy Lee.
voice on "raindrops cast in lead" = Michele Fiedler Fuentes.

thanks: Sam T, Rainer, John + Ryan, cst, Shaun, Jem, Yann.