The Go! Team have shared Divebomb, the first single lifted from their new album ‘Get Up Sequences Part Two’ which is out via Memphis Industries on February 3, 2023. It’s a three-minute, blown out, amped up, Pro-Choice exaltation of acting up and activism featuring Detroit-based rapper IndigoYaj. “Protest songs have always been a balancing act,” says The Go! Team’s Ian Parton. “If you’re too sledgehammer it’s cringey – like the Scorpions’ Winds of Change or something – but at the same time given the stuff they’re trying to pull with abortion rights it feels weird to ignore it.”
“’Get Up Sequences Part Two’ is an international patchwork. A global fruit salad. A United Nations of Sound” – Ian Parton, The Go! Team
Over their six albums, The Go! Team has taken sonic day trips to other lands – musically dipping into other cultures. But now on this, their seventh – they’ve bought a round-the-world ticket…. Benin, Japan, France, India, Texas, and Detroit – all stops along the way. Wildly different voices from wildly different cultures side by side but all still sounding unmistakably Go! Team. Setting the course for a kaleidoscopic, cable access, channel hop. Watch the video for Divebomb via YouTube below.
On the vocal roll call, there’s Star Feminine Band, an all-girl group from West Africa, the Indian Bollywood playback singer Neha Hatwar, Kokubo Chisato from J-Pop indie band Lucie Too, 19-year-old Detroit rapper IndigoYaj, Hilarie Bratset (ex-Apples in Stereo), Brooklyn rapper Nitty Scott, and a whole host of others, alongside Go! Team staple Ninja.
“Maybe it’s an anti-Brexit reflex,” says Parton. “A rejection of flag-waving and inward-facing. But this is no Coke ad, some Valium vision of joining hands on a hillside. The Go! Team has always been about knowing what’s happening but focusing on the good shit. It’s about where you let your attention settle.”
Latter-day Go! Team records have been on a journey of meaning. Often lyrics are heavier than the music suggests. “There is definitely a recurring message of action and organising,” says Parton, though sometimes the message is more coded. Take the song Getting to Know (All the Ways We’re Wrong For Each Other), rather than the song being about a couple who are wrong for each other, it’s about a girl deciding her country is wrong for her. A coded message of anti-patriotism set to sunshine funk.
Elsewhere the track But We Keep on Trying is about the unglamorous business of getting back up and going again while the Pro-Choice call to arms of the first single Divebomb is their most combative yet. A 3-minute, blown-out, amped-up exaltation of acting up and activism.
Whammy-O sees The Go! Team collaborate with NYC rapper Nitty Scott who brings an abstract, cut-up approach to the rhymes: “while you left the water running, we were reading poetry to lions and becoming.” It sounds like The Go! Team but somehow more class of ’23. And on Gemini, Ninja takes a celestial viewpoint, the steel drum ricocheting off planets whilst Ninja raps from space – taking braggadocios to an intergalactic level: “galaxies got em all aligned, made a universe to my design.” Flute meteor showers, ping pong laser beams, cascading kalimbas. Its horoscope electro, star-sign synths, astrological acid.
Picking up from 2021’s ‘Get Up Sequences Part One,’ Part Two continues the feeling of Technicolour overload. “A feeling that there is so much good shit out there that you are grabbing it all at the same time. The record is saying: “Look at this. Look at this”. When you listen to it I just want the saturation of the world to be turned up”. Simultaneously messy and tight, chaotic and coherent both albums have an obsession with the power of a bassline and a backbeat. “For me each successive Go! Team record just gets fucking groovier and for me grooviness is life,” Parton says.
It’s a journey spanning Cyclone Tracey wig-outs, chroma key sitar psychedelia, Casiotone anthems, spoken word melodrama and kalimba callouts. Brill building melodies lead into musical handbrake turns, four-track into panoramic.
Eighteen years after their debut LP, The Go! Team is still unlike anyone else and on ‘Get Up Sequences Part Two’ they sound as fresh as a club soda….
‘Get Up Sequences Part Two’ is available to preorder on Bomtempi Orange vinyl via Rough Trade here and on Columbo Yellow vinyl with signed art print direct from The Go! Team shop here and your favourite local indie store here.
The Go! Team will be on tour throughout the UK as follows – tickets on sale now here.
UK tour dates
03 March – Cambridge, Junction
04 March – Southampton, Engine Rooms
05 March – Margate, Dreamland
09 March – Reading, Sub 89
10 March – Newcastle, Boiler Shop
11 March – Birmingham, The Mill
12 March – Bristol, The Fleece
16 March – Nottingham, Rescue Rooms
17 March – Sheffield, Leadmill
18 March – Edinburgh, Liquid Rooms
19 March – Glasgow, SWG3
25 March – Manchester, Gorilla
26 March – Leeds, Brudenell
31 March – London, Lafayette
01 April – Brighton, Chalk
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‘Get Up Sequences Part Two’ track list
1. Look Away, Look Away
2. Divebomb
3. Getting To Know (All The Ways We’re Wrong For Each Other)
4. Stay and Ask Me In a Different Way
5. The Me Frequency
6. Whammy-O
7. But We Keep On Trying
8. Sock It To Me
9. Going Nowhere
10. Gemini
11. Train Song
12. Baby
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