LCD Soundsystem Reveal Cover for May 18th LP "This Is Happening"

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Just when we were growing fond of calling LCD Soundsystem's upcoming album "TBA," James Murphy and Co. revealed today on their DFA Records site that the band's third album will have a proper title, This Is Happening. Accompanying news of the title was Murphy's Twitter announcement, "Well, we finally made a cover...," which is that sideways portrait up top of Murphy dancing. The cover image features a stylistic motif reminiscent of David Bowie's Lodger, and as listeners will discover when This Is Happening is released on May 18th, those two albums share some musical similarities as well.

Happening's default first single "Drunk Girls" is streaming now on LCD's official site. (We say "default" because it's the only one of the nine songs on This Is Happening that clocks in under five minutes.) "Drunk Girl" itself — which kind of sounds like Lodger's "Boys Keep Swinging" fused with Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat" — earned a four-star song review from Rolling Stone in our new issue hitting stands tomorrow.

As for the album's title, This Is Happening will undoubtedly be joining other great albums like Michael Jackson's This Is It and Galaxie 500's This Is Our Music on the pantheon of great This Is albums. (Plus, it's a whole lot better than M. Night Shamalyan's The Happening.) As Rolling Stone reported yesterday, LCD Soundsystem will perform at both this summer's Reading and Leeds festivals in the U.K., plus fests like Coachella, Bonnaroo, Sasquatch! and Camp Bisco here in the States.

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Song Stories

“Karma Chameleon”

Culture Club | 1983

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."

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