The day all you Gen X’ers have been waiting for is finally here—the day Greg Dulli leads his old band The Afghan Whigs in their first proper single since the Clinton years. Beginning with a familiar “Be My Baby” beat, “Algiers” segues right into a heart-sinking ballad, complete with a gentle guitar strum, a steady-handed rhythm section and Dulli’s subtle vocal shifts.
“I stopped smoking five years ago,” he explained in an Entertainment Weekly interview, “and my voice is able to do things it wasn’t able to do when I was a smoker. I’ve also been singing for a long time now, and I’ve learned some tricks along the way. On that song, I remember when I started singing it, I was imagining Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Eric Carmen—those were the three lines that popped into my head. There are echoes of each of them in there. I like to try different things, and I got to be a character a little bit inside the song. I said, ‘I’m gonna croon this one,’ so croon I did.”
Check it out in the video player above and the rest of Do to the Beast—the band’s long-awaited follow-up to 1998’s 1965 (yeah)—on April 15th through Sub Pop…
