YACHT Announce New Album I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler Via Billboard

Still from drone video footage shot by Renee Lusano

Los Angeles dance-rock act YACHT have announced the follow-up to 2011’s Shangri-La in a very big way. Today, the duo dropped a Google Maps pin at the location of a Los Angeles intersection, where a billboard could be found reading “I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler”: the title of their fifth album. It’s out this fall on Downtown Records.

YACHT’s Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans are currently hanging out in front of the billboard. Tune in to Periscope now to see them in action. Below, watch a video of the billboard, shot on a drone.

The YouTube video description for the video contains with the following message:

The future is an impossible goal. It’s something we chase after, believing in an illusion of control. That isn’t to say our actions don’t affect what the future is like— in our case, hot, dry, loud, unjust—but that once we catch up to yesterday’s future, it’s no longer what we imagined. It’s just the present all over again. And so on.

We’ve made an album about that. It contains some speculations about the future that are big and distant as science fiction stories. But it’s also about looking carefully at the world around us and trying to understand what we’ve done with the imaginations of those who came before us. Would they believe it?

We live in a complex moment. There seem to be networks at every level of reality; as with all our technologies, we can’t keep ourselves from grabbing them, turning them around, and using them as a mirror. Every person is a node. Our technological economy is full of entities selling our own lives back to us. It’s easy to feel disillusioned, if only it wasn’t all so funny sometimes. #ITTFWBC

Watch YACHT perform “Summer Song” on Pitchfork.tv: