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First Listen: Moby, 'Innocents'

Moby's new album, <em>Innocents</em>, comes out Oct. 1.
Courtesy of the artist
Moby's new album, Innocents, comes out Oct. 1.

The story of Moby's 11th album is one of collaboration: Innocents, his first full-length recording with an outside producer (Mark Stent, who's worked alongside virtually everyone in pop), finds the versatile multi-instrumentalist recruiting an impressive assortment of guest vocalists. Cold Specks' marvelous Al Spx lends soulful and vulnerable contributions to "A Case for Shame" and "Tell Me" — her voice's idiosyncratic beauty meshes perfectly with Moby's warm-but-dark sensibilities — while other songs bring in contributions from Damien Jurado, Skylar Grey, Mark Lanegan, The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne and others.

Moby isn't new to working with outside vocalists — when NPR Music brought him in to write and record a song in two days, we paired him up with Kelli Scarr — but Innocents is unusually generous in its abundance of prominent guests, especially men (a rarity for Moby). The result recalls an incomplete but sizable cross-section of the musician's many sounds, from Play-style appropriations of old spirituals ("A Long Time," "The Last Day") to gauzy ambient works ("Going Wrong") to gloomily atmospheric ballads like "The Lonely Night" (featuring Lanegan), with Innocents' title capturing its unifying theme.

As such, the album lacks the seamless cohesiveness of Moby classics like 1995's dreamily drifting Everything Is Wrong and 1999's sample-driven Play. But, more than 20 years after his breakthrough single — and more than 30 years into a try-it-all career that began in punk and has since worked its way through countless iterations of dance music — Innocents feels like the work of an artist who's been liberated to pursue beauty and emotion in as many forms as he can muster.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson
Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)