It's creation led by pure emotion, Cate Le Bon's seventh record "Michelangelo Dying" usurped the album she thought she was making. The product of all‑consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album about love, and in time a kind of exorcism. What emerges is a wonderfully iridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up but which in doing so, picks at it too. Musically, there is a continuation and expansion of a sound—a machine with a heart—that has taken shape over her last two records (2019’s *Reward* and 2022’s *Pompeii*) as Le Bon has increasingly taken control of the playing and producing herself. As guitars and saxophones are pushed through pedals and percussion and voices are fed through flangers, a green and silky sound emerges, with flashes of the artistic singularities of David Bowie, Nico, John McGeoch and Laurie Anderson surfacing and disappearing like a boat waterline throughout.
What we’re left with is an ever‑changing, continuous entity—a kind of song cycle. Each iteration reflects and progresses the last, each time the same broken mirror shifting, glinting, concealing and revealing, depending on how it is turned in the light. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, no revelations and no conclusions. There is repetition and chaos. This album invites the listener to experience it without resistance and without searching for a reason or meaning. An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, and of humanity for both listener and artist, "Michelangelo Dying" knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. The characters are interchangeable, concludes Cate, but at the end of it all, it's me meeting myself.
**Tracklist:**
1. Jerome
2. Love Unrehearsed
3. Mothers of Riches
4. Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?
5. Pieces of My Heart
6. About Time
7. Heaven Is No Feeling
8. Body As a River
9. Ride feat. John Cale
10. I Know What's Nice
 
Label: Mexican Summer
Vendor: Kemado Group, INC
Distributor: AMPED
UPC: 184923135305
Genre: Rock
Release Date: 9/26/2025
Product ID: MXSU3530.1