Andrew W.K. has released Temptation to Exist with no warning and almost no rock music on it. The ten-track album is his first release in five years, following God Is Partying in 2021, and it swaps the maximalist hard rock he built a career on for something closer to jazz noir.
The instrumentation tells the story. A press release describes a sprawling instrumental landscape of piano, brass, woodwinds, cello, percussion, vibraphone, organ and synthesizers, and W.K. produced and mixed it himself while playing piano, guitar, bass, drums, percussion, organ, celeste, vibraphone, keyboards and synthesizers across the record. It was recorded and mixed at Valentine Studios in Los Angeles.
There is precedent, if you go back far enough. His 2009 record 55 Cadillac was solo piano working in a free, new age direction, and Metal Injection read the new album as a return to that mode with a full band behind him this time instead of one instrument.
The rollout was as unusual as the music. The record first appeared online on the night of August 27 through AWKSHARE, a free fan-run non-profit platform dedicated to archiving his work, was announced on an Instagram account that now appears to be fan-run, and was then reshared by his wife, the actress Kat Dennings, on her own story. For a while it lived only on YouTube Music and nowhere else.
The tracklist runs "Michael's Theme," "Nightmares," "Edge of Interior," "Between Veils," "No Clue," "Manhattan Beach," "North Hollywood," "Double Boulevard," "For Steven" and "Insomnia." The titles read as places and states rather than slogans, which is a long way from "Party Hard."
The quiet stretch behind it was domestic rather than mysterious. W.K. announced his engagement to Dennings in May 2021 and married her in a small Los Angeles ceremony in 2023 with about fifteen guests. The album is filed under rock and jazz, and its date sits on the release calendar. Unannounced drops have been common this month, including King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's Alien Metal and Ween's Golden Wastes EP.
The facts
- Temptation to Exist is a ten-track instrumental album.
- It is his first release since God Is Partying in 2021.
- He produced, mixed and played most of the record himself.
- It was recorded and mixed at Valentine Studios in Los Angeles.
- The album first appeared through the fan-run platform AWKSHARE.
- Tracks include Michael's Theme, Manhattan Beach and Insomnia.
How this checks out
Confirmed
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Cited sources 3
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