The sample-happy tape intellectuals The Books will drop their first album in five years on July 20, causing a million indie-rock dudes and perhaps the French Ministry of Culture to cream their jeans. The Way Out is beautiful and characteristically conceptual, built upon samples culled from old self-help recordings and glued to a flurry of seemingly unrelated ideas. "A Cold Freezin' Night" is comprised of scraps of two children talking into tapes, a boy and a girl, and we daresay it expresses burgeoning feminist anger—the boy, untethered and proud, screams about "a cold freezin' night" triumphantly, while the girl, miserable with rage, sighs, I wish I was a boy, in addition to delivering a short uninhibited treatise Valerie Solanas could totally get down with. (I'm gonna rip your balls off). But its guitar tickling harmonies and nail-gun of a beat neutralize its violent impulses, showing that even underneath age-old gender friction, there's got to be some humorous release.
Download: The Books, "A Cold Freezin' Night"