Iggy Pop
Iggy Pop has unveiled the first track from Post Pop Depression, the album he has made with Josh Homme and Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age, and Matt Helders of the Arctic Monkeys. Gardenia manages to be both slinky and spiky, with Pop crooning on top that all he wants is to “tell Gardenia what to do tonight”.
The album was revealed on Thursday, via an interview in the New York Times with Pop and Homme, having been recorded in secrecy. Homme said the album was an attempt to pick up where Pop’s 1977 albums The Idiot and Lust for Life left off. Where those records pointed, it stopped,” he said. “But without copying it,” he continued, “that direction actually goes for miles. And when you keep going for miles you can’t see these two records any more.”
Pop and Homme financed the album themselves, and Pop said he felt the need to reassert himself as an artist in his own right, following the upsurge in the popularity of the Stooges following their reunion. “I was feeling challenged at this point in my life to prove my value as a musical artist, not as a symbol of anything,” he said.
The album’s spark was a text Pop sent to Homme saying “it would be great if we got together and maybe write something sometime”. Pop sent Homme a package of lyrics and writing, but it was three months before Homme got back to him. Once they started working, though, they completed the album quickly.
Homme said it had been a welcome distraction from the aftermath of massacre at the Bataclan in Paris, during a gig by his friends Eagles of Death Metal. “The fact that I had this to work on, it saved me,” he said.