Nils Frahm, has announced his new full-length, Old Friends New Friends, will drop on December 3rd via Leiter. Ahead of the release, the composer, producer and performer has shared lead single “All Numbers End.” This collection includes 23 solo piano tracks recorded between 2009 and 2021, almost all hitherto unreleased but omitted from previous albums and projects for one reason or another. The album offers “an anatomy of all my ways of thinking musically and playing,” Frahm says, adding with a smile, “Maybe I could say it’s an album I worked on for twelve years, and finally I have enough material?”

Old Friends New Friends was pieced together during the pandemic as Frahm used the time to arrange his archives, conscious of the sheer number of recordings he’d accumulated. Having selected his favorites, he realised how, when he listened to them together, they offered “a different spectrum of freedom for me. I forgot that some tracks are ten years old, some two, and they’re all played on different pianos. Instead, I remembered how, as a fan, I love albums like this. With a lot of my records, there’s a point where you feel, ‘This is the centerpiece,’ but here I wasn’t really worrying about that. It still feels like my universe, though, and I’m proud that all these things which I never found a way to unite before now work together. It’s like I tossed flowers indiscriminately into a vase and then realised it looked exactly right.”

Importantly, Frahm felt an urge to clean the slate before making his next move. His debut, Streichelfisch, was released 16 years ago, and not only has his solo output since then been prolific, but he’s also engaged in large amounts of collaborative work with friends like Ólafur Arnalds, Peter Broderick, F.S. Blumm, Library Tapes, and Anne Müller. “My intuition,” he says, “is that it’s easier for me to start over if the body of work from the last ten years or so is organised enough that I never need to worry about it again. It’s time to forget about the past, but in order to never think about it again, I have to address it first.”

Whether or not it’s prudent to add to the significant amount of music he’s released in recent years, Frahm’s unconcerned. “History tells us people sometimes pick up on records years later and still like them, so hopefully, my music isn’t bound to any specific date. If people hear this for the first time in, say, 20 years, they won’t worry about when it came out or whether something else came out the same year.”

Nils Frahm
Old Friends New Friends
Track List

1. 4:33 (A Tribute to John Cage)
2. Late
3. Berduxa
4. Rain Take
5. Todo Nada
6. Weddinger Walzer
7. In The Making
8. Further In The Making
9. All Numbers End
10. The Idea Machine
11. Then Patterns
12. Corn
13. New Friend
14. Nils Has A New Piano
15. Acting
16. As A Reminder
17. Iced Wood
18. Strickleiter
19. The Chords
20. The Chords (Broken Down)
21. Forgetmenot
22. Restive
23. Old Friend

Pre-order Old Friends New Friends by Nils Frahm HERE