2018 Blog

19th December 2018

Key Production Release of the Year + Album of the Year Staff Picks 2018

Unbelievable, 2018 is gone already!

We have once again picked our company release of the year and then each member of staff chose their own personal favourite 2018 album.

We wanted to thank everyone that chose Key to manufacture their releases this year, we are proud and happy to have worked on each one of them, it's been a year full of great music, we hope 2019 will be even better.

Long live the physical format!

Key Production Release of the Year

**Idles, Joy as an Act of Resistance, Partisan Records**

This release was an honour to collaborate on with Partisan Records to bring to life an exceptional body of work by the English rock band formed in Bristol back in 2011. This offering was the sophomore album by the band after releasing their critically acclaimed introduction to the world in the form of "Brutalism" in 2017. Joy as an Act of Resistance was produced by Space and mixed by Adam Greenspan & Nick Launay (Arcade Fire, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kate Bush). The band started recording the album in 2017. Singer Joseph Talbot stated, "This album is an attempt to be vulnerable to our audience and to encourage vulnerability; a brave naked smile in this shitty new world."The album's lyrics deal with toxic masculinity, love, self-love, immigration, Brexit, and class. "June" deals with the death in childbirth of his daughter Agatha. It also includes a cover version of Solomon Burke's "Cry To Me".

According to Talbot "Lots of songs got scrapped because there was this pressure, which we were carrying but not talking about. We were trying to sustain the success of "Brutalism", to basically remake it. So we kind of scrapped all the songs and talked about why we weren't enjoying writing it." The album was produced by Space and mixed by Adam Greenspan and Nick Launay. The album's cover art features a photograph of a fight at a wedding in 1968 that Talbot saw on Instagram. Four of the album's tracks were made available for download prior to its release: "Colossus", "Danny Nedelko" (named after Talbot's friend of the same name and singer with Heavy Lungs), "Samaritans" and "Great". To promote the album, the band announced a world tour taking in Japan, North America and Europe. The day before the album's release, an art exhibition in London will open, displaying and selling artworks inspired by the album, with the proceeds going to the charity Samaritans.