Alpha Zulu is the seventh studio album by French indie pop band Phoenix, released on 4 November 2022 through Loyauté and Glassnote Records. Self-produced by the band, it is their first album since 2017's Ti Amo. The singles "Identical", "Alpha Zulu", "Tonight", and "Winter Solstice" preceded the album. The band embarked on a tour in support of the album, which visited North America, the UK and Europe in late 2022, with another tour of North America set to commence in August 2023. The album received critical acclaim.
Background and recording
Phoenix began recording the album during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 at the Musée des Arts décoratifs studio, which is located within the Louvre Palace in Paris. Laurent Brancowitz said the band "felt it would be a fantastic adventure to create something out of nothing" in an empty museum. Christian Mazzalai said that despite his initial concerns of making something while being surrounded by "too much beauty", the band "couldn't stop producing music" and that they wrote "almost all" of Alpha Zulu within the first 10 days. The album was inspired by Philippe Zdar of the band Cassius, who died in 2019. Zdar produced three of Phoenix's prior albums and gave advice to the band regularly, even on records he did not produce. While contributing no actual compositions or productions to the album, Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk was asked by the band to help in the same advisory role.
The song "Identical" was first released in 2020 on the soundtrack for Sofia Coppola's film On the Rocks. Following the song's release, frontman Thomas Mars stated that it "goes in a different sonic direction from the LP", which feels "all over the place" and like the "same sort of weird Frankenstein of an album" that the band's debut United is. The version of "Identical" released in 2020 has a duration of 3:13, while the listed length of the Alpha Zulu version is 5:02.
Artwork and title
Pascal Teixeira's cover art for Alpha Zulu and accompanying singles is an edited portion of the 1478 painting Madonna col Bambino mediante otto angeli by Sandro Botticelli. The inspiration for the title came from Mars hearing "alpha zulu" over an airplane radio during a bout of turbulence. The words come from the ICAO alphabet, also known as the NATO phonetic alphabet; Alpha would phonetically be used for the letter A, and Zulu for the letter Z.
Promotion
Phoenix toured North America during September and October 2022 to promote the album. They performed at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City on 9 September 2022. They also appeared and performed on several late night talk shows including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Phoenix toured Europe in late 2022 and will tour Asia and make festival appearances across the world in 2023. Phoenix are set to tour North America with Beck from August to September 2023 on the Summer Odyssey Tour, which will visit 20 cities.
Critical reception
On Metacritic, Alpha Zulu received a score of 84 out of 100 based on 16 critics' reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Helen Brown of The Independent felt that the album "is packed with an impressive amount of energy and ideas for a band celebrating their 25th anniversary" and "all 10 tracks are stacked with hooks, making it as good as their 2009 breakthrough album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix". Writing for NME, Thomas Smith called it an album "that further confirms their place as one of the scene's most consistently enjoyable bands" with "nods to the razor-sharp pop hits from their beginnings ('If I Ever Feel Better'), to the indie-disco bangers that preceded their era of early '10s indie" like "1901" and "Lisztomania".
Concluding the album review for AllMusic, Heather Phares claimed it to be "Phoenix's most immediate work since Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and their most varied since United, Alpha Zulu does indeed range from A to Z, but the band are always in control and the results are frequently brilliant." David Smyth of the Evening Standard wrote that "With a sound that has never dated, there's plenty more here to confirm that there's no reason why Phoenix should stop doing what they're doing now."