Weekly News Round-Up: The Black Keys, The National and more

You’re in the right place if you’ve missed any of the week’s top news stories – here Live4ever’s Weekly News Round-Up presents a recap of the biggest headlines we featured during the last seven days.

Alysse Gafkjen

The Black Keys are backwith a single entitled Lo/Hi.

It’s the first new music from Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney since 2014’s Turn Blue, but the intervening time has hardly been a holiday for the pair. Indeed, only a couple of weeks ago Carney was busy launching his latest side-project, Sad Planets.

The team behind Liverpool’s Fusion Festival have announced a new one-day event in the city dubbed Fusion Presents.

Kings Of Leon have been confirmed as its first headliner, with Franz Ferdinand, Echo & The Bunnymen, Circa Waves and Sam Fender also signed up for Sefton Park on August 30th.

Noel Gallagher will embark on a tour of North America during August with The Smashing Pumpkins.

It opens at the BB&T Pavilion in Camden, NJ on August 8th and continues right through the month before ending in Mountain View, CA. This adds to various UK and European shows which Gallagher has booked for the spring.

Keith Flint, singer with the Prodigy during their conquering 90s heydey and beyond, has died.

NME quoted an Essex Police spokesperson as saying they were ‘called to concerns for the welfare of a man at an address in Brook Hill, North End’ this morning (March 4th).

The National live at Manchester Apollo. September 2017. (Gary Mather / Live4ever)

The National will release their new album I Am Easy To Find on May 17th.

The concept for I Am Easy To Find can be traced back to September 2017 when director Mike Mills approached Matt Berninger with the intention of working together on an ambitious but unspecified project.

On their new single Roy’s Tune, Fontaines D.C. are showing (if it wasn’t already obvious) that there’ll be far more to their debut album Dogrel than the lazy ‘punk’ tag when it is released on April 12th.

Guitarist Conor Curley has said the track is, ‘sung to Ireland – from a mindset of frustration, depression, and a loss of innocence’.

Richard Hawley has announced his new album Further.

As the title suggests, despite still being largely recorded there Hawley has looked beyond his beloved Sheffield whilst crafting his eighth studio album. “I really wanted to challenge myself to try to keep things relatively up-tempo and keep the songs to about three minutes long,” Hawley says.

Vampire Weekend have shared another two songs from their new album Father Of The Bride.

Following on from the delightful Harmony Hall and 2021 are Sunflower and Big Blue, giving us more from the double album which will succeed 2013’s Modern Vampires Of The City on May 3rd.