Peter Cat Recording Co. has announced a new album, “Beta,” out Aug. 9 via Muddy Water.
The first single will arrive May 16, as the band announced headlining tour dates beginning in August. After an opening run with Khruangbin, Peter Cat will tour the U.S., U.K. and Europe before returning home for a string of dates in India. Tickets for the headlining dates go on sale Thursday, May 16, at 10 a.m. local time.
The New Delhi-based band teased the record on Instagram Wednesday, with a video featuring a herd of elephants devouring an edible arrangement with the album’s title written in watermelon slices.
“‘Beta’ is a collection of stories about the future told 50 years in the past, to make sense of the present, on our only home, planet Earth,” the band noted of the upcoming album, its first since 2019’s “Bismillah.”
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A press release said that “Beta” was just one of five potential titles for the album, as the band wrote down all five and let drummer Karan Singh’s six-month-old son reach in and choose one. The result, “Beta,” translates to “child” in Hindi.
Produced by Peter Cat’s own Suryakant Sawhney, Kartik Pillai and Dhruv Bhola, the album promises a “whimsical amalgamation of indie, bossa nova, jazz, psychedelic and more.” As displayed in “Bismillah,” the band is also heavily influenced by crooner music.
“That style of singing is really emotional,” Sawhney told PvNew in April 2023, when Peter Cat last performed in New York. “I also enjoy it in this weird masculine way. I was drawn to that strong, macho voice when I was younger. But it was conservative, you know? Those guys couldn’t sing sleazy shit. They had to come up with cheesy ways of saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna fuck tonight.’ So I like the idea of it being grimy.”
View the tour poster below, and purchase tickets here.
