Angus & Julia Stone today release their new album Karaoke Bar via Virgin Music, a record shaped by travel, instinct and connection. Buy/stream here.
Written and recorded across Greece, France and Australia, Karaoke Bar captures a period of movement and creative exploration for the duo, with each location leaving its imprint across the music. Much of the album was developed during periods of writing and recording in between touring their 2024 album Cape Forestier, with the time on the road and the quiet gaps between shows informing the reflective, free-flowing nature of the record. The result is a body of work that moves between intimacy and expansiveness, grounded in emotional clarity and a shared sense of experience.
Across the album, Angus & Julia Stone continue to refine their signature songwriting language, blending unison and harmony vocals with atmospheric, cinematic production that shifts between stillness and scale. The record unfolds as a series of songs that each hold their own emotional world while contributing to a cohesive whole.
The album’s title track Karaoke Bar was born on the Greek island of Hydra, where late-night writing sessions and days spent by the water shaped its sense of warmth and spontaneity. The song captures the feeling of shared experience between strangers, where music becomes a bridge that dissolves distance and creates a moment of collective release. Monroe continues that emotional thread in a different environment, recorded during a rare week at Miraval Studios in the south of France, while Celestial Bodies, created across Hydra, Greece and Australia, reflects a sense of searching and emotional expansion, carrying with it imagery of nature, weather and shifting perspective as a way of exploring deeper questions of meaning and presence.
The Start opens with rhythmic drive and bright Julia-led vocals, setting a tone of vulnerability and emotional release, lifted by a chant-like refrain, before Strangely Strangely settles into a sleek, sultry Angus-led performance built around a subtle flute line, tracing the moment distance becomes unnecessary and the decision to let someone follow their own path.
Take Me Back to Japan offers a tender and nostalgic lens, reflecting on time spent in Tokyo and the emotional imprint of place, while Brightest Place shifts into a more energetic register, capturing the pull of shared spaces and emotional clarity that can emerge within movement and city light. Cowgirls Lover Boi injects a playful energy into the record, built on a guitar-led country groove and driving bass line that delivers a tongue-in-cheek take on a chaotic romantic encounter, unfolding into sleek, expressive guitar-led instrumentation. The Cherry Farm sits in a more reflective space again, exploring memory, loss and the passage of time, with a focus on how emotional history continues to shape the present, before Mexico City closes the album with buoyant energy, pairing an uplifting melody with Angus’ rhythmic vocal delivery to explore themes of hope, connection and the universality of heartbreak.
With Karaoke Bar, Angus & Julia Stone present a record shaped by movement, memory and emotional openness, offering a collection of songs that reflect both where they have been and the shared emotional space their music continues to create.
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