Beck releases the album Ride Lonesome, his first record in seven years

Beck has released Ride Lonesome, which DIY counts as his fifteenth album and his first full-length since Hyperspace in 2019. Capitol Records has it, Beck produced it himself, and Nigel Godrich mixed it, a pairing that goes back through most of the records this one is being compared to.

The personnel are the clearest signal of what it is. DIY says the sessions reunited Beck with musicians from across his catalogue, including players who worked on Sea Change, Morning Phase and Mutations, which puts the record in the quiet, acoustic strand of his work rather than the sample-heavy one.

Beck describes the process as both a return and a search. "While we were revisiting a musical and physical place, it also felt like we were finding new sounds and emotional textures along the way," he says, which is about as direct an account of a deliberate sequel as an artist tends to give.

The album came out with a video for its second track, Run Away, directed by Mikai Karl and starring Tadanobu Asano. Karl has handled the other Ride Lonesome visuals, so the campaign has kept one director across it rather than treating each single separately.

Two singles preceded it. In The Night arrived first, with Disappearing Act following in August, both of them trailing a record DIY has since reviewed at four and a half stars and called a return to form.

The touring begins almost immediately. The Ride Lonesome tour opens on 22 September at the Santa Barbara Bowl and runs through the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, Red Rocks, San Francisco's Masonic, Toronto's Massey Hall and Brooklyn Paramount before finishing in Portland on 10 November.

We covered the second single at the time in the Disappearing Act release, and he turned up as a guest on somebody else's record this year too, covered in the Camilo Lara and Eblis Alvarez album. The album and the dates are tracked on the release calendar and the tour guide alongside the rest of the autumn's rock releases.