When a band or artist you haven’t heard new music from in a while starts doing cryptic stuff with their social media, it now seems quite fair to assume that they’re readying the release of a “surprise” album. (Recall Radiohead’s erasure of their website and social media prior to the release of A Moon Shaped Pool). Unless they’re doing this as some kind of cruel spoof of the trend with nothing whatsoever actually behind it, it would seem that Dirty Projectors are following a similar path, as their Facebook and Twitter accounts’ profile/cover images have been switched to black squares.
Accompanying the sudden shift to nothingness is an isolated moving image coupled with what could be a teaser of a new song. Like other seemingly similar instances of *potential* pre-release fan mystification (Frank Ocean’s Endless staircase), the imagery is minimal and clearly meant to induce curiosity — it’s just a pair of hands praying (or secularly making hand triangles), set to piano and a what sounds like a small gaggle of bassoons.
Dirty Projectors’ last album was 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan. Here’s the tweeted video:
Also, this Tweet from a few months ago (yet one of the most recent things to be shared on the band’s account) may be taken as further suggestion that there’s new music on the horizon: