Liars announce new album ‘A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans’, out 5 March 2027 on Mute
Liars announce new album “A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans,” out 5 March 2027 on Mute Records, and share first single “Ice Pick, Kalamazoo.”
Liars will release their new album A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans through Mute Records on 5 March 2027. The band, now the solo recording vehicle of Angus Andrew, has shared the first single, “Ice Pick, Kalamazoo,” alongside UK and European tour dates in October.
“Ice Pick, Kalamazoo” takes its title from the city in Michigan where Andrew relocated with his wife and daughter. Soon after moving, he noticed a persistent smell around the family home and his daughter’s school, traced to hydrogen sulphide and other pollutants released by a local packaging factory at levels the state health department flagged as dangerous enough to advise residents to stay indoors. Andrew got involved in a campaign to hold the factory accountable, and the experience, and its tangle of environmental damage, corporate responsibility and bureaucratic inertia, became the starting point for the new album.
“A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans” takes its title from an actual Michigan statute that bars local governments from banning single-use plastic bags, a piece of legislation Andrew found emblematic of how attempts to reduce environmental harm can themselves become targets for prohibition. “You become so used to something, you lose your sense of it,” Andrew said of the theme running through the record: how injustice settles into the background of daily life, and how draining it becomes to keep pushing against institutions built to outlast that resistance.
The album was written and recorded across the United States and Australia, where Andrew now lives, in collaboration with drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell, both of whom worked on 2021’s “The Apple Drop” and have toured with Liars since 2017’s “TFCF”. Rather than building the songs from finished demos, the three musicians worked through improvisation, developing material across continents by ear rather than by score. Andrew describes the result as a different kind of political record, one concerned less with protest itself than with the toll of sustaining it. “It wasn’t just the environment that was polluted,” he said. “It was also my mind.”
“A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans” will be released on white recycled and recyclable PET vinyl, CD and digital formats. The tracklist runs: “Happy Or Not,” “Ice Pick, Kalamazoo,” “Laced Plume,” “Urgent As Always,” “Deep Deeper,” “Disaster Tropes,” “Beat Creep Some Eyes,” “Real Time Trespasser,” “SHAME!,” “Retention Arc” and “Out Of Order.”
The period leading up to the album followed the disruption of the pandemic, when touring plans for “The Apple Drop” fell through and Andrew stepped back from making new Liars music for the first time since his teens. He spent the time on other projects instead, founding the record label No Gold and the experimental platform Essential Tremors. “Both of those things were really about listening,” he said, describing the shift away from being “a full-time creator” toward closer engagement with other artists and with his adopted surroundings in Kalamazoo.
Liars tour dates for ‘A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans’
The album announcement comes with UK and European tour dates, giving audiences a rare chance to see the band’s live show in intimate rooms, plus a one-off 20th-anniversary performance of “Drums Not Dead” with two Polish percussionists, including Macio Moretti, at Unsound Festival. Tickets go on sale from 10am local time on 11 September via the band’s official site.
- 2 October – Bucharest, Romania – Control Club (Opening Party)
- 3 October – Nantes, France – Le Lieu Unique
- 5 October – Milan, Italy – Arci Bellezza
- 9 October – Krakow, Poland – Unsound Festival (“Drums Not Dead” 20th-anniversary performance)
- 10 October – Belgrade, Serbia – Changeover Festival
- 12 October – Prague, Czech Republic – Punctum
- 13 October – Berlin, Germany – Neue Zukunft
- 15 October – Amsterdam, Netherlands – Paradiso
- 17 October – Kortrijk, Belgium – Atelier Nooitgedacht
- 18 October – Liege, Belgium – Kultura
- 20 October – London, UK – Moth Club
- 22 October – Paris, France – Boule Noire
- 24 October – Copenhagen, Denmark – Ideal Bar
About Liars
Angus Andrew and Aaron Hemphill met in the late 1990s in Los Angeles, where Andrew was studying photography at CalArts and Hemphill worked at a local record store. The two began recording together before relocating to New York, where they answered a musicians’ wanted ad from bassist Pat Noecker and drummer Ron Albertson. The four-piece was formally christened Liars in New York in November 2000. Working with producer Steve Revitte, the band recorded its debut album, “They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top,” in two days; it was released in October 2001 on Gern Blandsten Records, with Blast First and later Mute Records handling subsequent reissues.
Albertson left the band in 2000 before the debut’s release, and Noecker departed in 2002; multi-instrumentalist Julian Gross joined in 2003. Liars moved to Mute Records for 2004’s “They Were Wrong, So We Drowned” and continued releasing albums on the label through 2006’s “Drums Not Dead,” their self-titled 2007 album, 2010’s “Sisterworld,” 2012’s “WIXIW,” 2014’s “Mess,” 2017’s “TFCF” and 2021’s “The Apple Drop.” Hemphill left the band amicably around the release of “TFCF,” after which Andrew continued Liars as a solo recording project, working with a rotating cast of collaborators including Laurence Pike and Cameron Deyell.
Since “The Apple Drop,” Andrew has also run the label No Gold and the experimental platform Essential Tremors from Australia, where he now lives. “A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans,” due 5 March 2027 on Mute, is Liars’ tenth studio album and their first release since “The Apple Drop,” accompanied by their first UK and European live dates in years.
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