Drew Daniel – one half of the electronic duo Matmos – has announced a new album under his solo project The Soft Pink Truth. Due out January 30 via Thrill Jockey, Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? is the eighth album in the project's canon, and fourth for Thrill Jockey. It also continues Daniel's tradition of naming these albums with questions, following 2022's Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?

With the news, Daniel has shared first single "Time Inside the Violet", which you can check out below via a video co-created by Matthew Sullivan and Vicki Bennett:

Daniel says of the new song:

"The phrase 'time inside the violet' appears in a poem written by my friend Chris Nealon, and I use it with his kind permission. This entire album is a reflection on time, its passage and retrieval, and the emotional turbulence that can wash over you as you feel time’s irreversibility. There is a central piano figure played by [husband and Matmos partner] M.C. Schmidt, here arranged for strings by Ulas Kurugullu, until there is a kind of violent interruption of that pattern, a sudden feeling of panic, and then the music re-orients itself as the piano figure returns. Thinking about how to translate this visually, I asked Matthew Sullivan to animate a camera that could fly into an hourglass and down and through it. Once I had Matthew’s animation, I knew that I wanted someone else to create a kind of miniature nightmare sequence to interrupt its steady motion, so I asked Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us, to create that for me."

Daniel – who is also an English professor at Johns Hopkins University – worked on the record with a slew of international artists: string player & arranger Ulas Kurugullu; guitarist Bill Orcutt; harpists Neleta Ortiz and Cecilia Cuccolini; keyboardists Koye Berry and M.C. Schmidt; the Ebu String Quartet from the Peabody Institute; upright bassists Lorenzo Buffa and Zach Rowden of the noise duo Tongue Depressor; vocalist Helen Spencer Wallace; woodwind players Brandon Wilkins, Evelyn Frances, and Felipe Sosa; cellist Alejandro Quiles; saxophonists Andrew Bernstein of Horse Lords and Nicklas Dahlin; trumpeter Elin Andersson; french hornist Filippo Tramo; and trombonist Simon Fransman.

Intriguingly, the album is available on a limited mail-order exclusive variant of "puke green" vinyl.

Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? is out January 30. Preorder here. Full tracklist:

1. Mere Survival Is Not Enough
2. And By and By A Cloud Takes All Away
3. Phrygian Ganymede
4. Underneath (I)
5. L’Esprit de L’Escalier
6. Time Inside the Violet 04:57
7. Orchard
8. Underneath (II)