Australia's favourite pop princess returns this week with her 14th studio album Golden, here's everything you need to know...
Australia's favourite pop princess returns this week with her 14th studio album Golden and, by all accounts, Kylie has ditched the disco tunes and the sequinned hotpants in favour of Nashville-influenced country vibes and rhinestone-studded jeans. Here's everything you need to know...
A little background...
In the years since 2014's Kiss Me Once, her final album of original material with longtime label Parlophone, Kylie has popped up here and there as a guest vocalist, notably on Giorgio Moroder's 2015 comeback album Déjà Vu and a collaborative EP with Fernando Garibay. Away from the music side of things, Kylie announced her engagement to British actor Joshua Sasse in February 2016, only to announce a year later that the pair had ended their relationship; we mention this only because the breakdown in their relationship seems to have fed into the lyrics on Golden, which has been described by some as her most personal album since 1997's soul-searching Impossible Princess.
Having inked a new recording deal with BMG in early 2017, recording sessions for the new album initially began in London and Los Angeles, with the songs reportedly following the disco-laced pop formula that has served her so well in recent years. However, sessions were then relocated to Nashville, a place that Kylie says had a “profound effect” on her, and the album began to take the more country-influenced direction of lead-off single 'Dancing', which was unveiled in January this year.
Who's producing it?
Sky Adams handles roughly a third of the album's production, while there are also production credits for Ash Howes, Richard Stannard, Lindsay Rimes, Jon Green and Eg White, amongst a handful of others.
Any special guests?
Just the one, with Jack Savoretti co-writing and putting in a vocal performance on the album's closing track 'Music's Too Sad Without You'.
What does it sound like?
Right form the get-go, the Nashville influence is obvious; opening track 'Dancing' has been described by Kylie herself as “Dolly Parton standing on a dancefloor”, which is as accurate a description as any we might conjure. The album's opening salvo blends twanging guitars with the familiar four-to-the-floor disco rhythms you might expect from the elder Minogue sister, and it's a similar story across much of the new album, which never quite goes 'full country', but instead fuses the famous Nashville sound with her own – 'Stop Me From Falling' and 'Raining Glitter' being two cases in point.
The fallout from her relationship break-up is most evident on songs like 'A Lifetime To Repair' and 'Love', while Kylie also bares her soul on others such as 'Shelby '68'. It's not quite Blood on the Tracks levels of candidness, but it's easy to see why this had been described as her most personal offering in years.
Does it deliver?
Golden isn't by any means the first album on which Kylie has experimented with her sound, but this isn't quite the full-blooded departure the dancefloor-filling output of her more recent albums that you might imagine. Perhaps the experience of mixed reactions to albums like Impossible Princess has made her more cautious about stepping too far away from a winning formula, but it's clear that Kylie felt the need to change things up and the result is something that should please both the fans she's gathered in recent years, and those who enjoyed some of the more 'out there' material she released in the late 1990s.
Golden is availble in hmv stores now, you can also find it here in our online store...
