Kevin Bronson on March 10th, 2021

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Current Joys, the cinematic indie-rock vehicle of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Nick Rattigan, have announced that their new album, “Voyager,” will be out May 14 via Secretly Canadian.

It’ll be the fifth Current Joys full-length (not including a 2014 B-sides collection and a 2020 live album) from Rattigan, the Nevada native who started the project in Reno and moved to New York before relocating to L.A.

The new single arrived today with the release of “Amateur” and its white-knuckle video, in which director Rattigan puts the viewer in the passenger seat for a bizarre ride through the desert. The new album is the follow-up to 2018’s “A Different Age,” which was a fully “visual album,” with a video for each of its nine tracks.

The influence of cinema on Current Joy’s music remains strong, with many of his tunes directly correlating to what he has seen in film. What’s new on “Voyager” is the production — as compared to his catalog of DIY home recordings, it was made with a full band at Stinson Beach Studios. “I’d just been very stubborn in wanting to do it all my own way, but I guess I’ve kind of opened up the creative process to more people at this point,” Rattigan says. “And I think it yields better results.”

The slow-building “Amateur” is certainly soundtrack-worthy. If the other 15 songs on the album are anything like it, “Voyager” promises to be a grand ride.

Last summer, Rattigan’s name surfaced amid the scandal involving allegations of musicians’ sexual misconduct. He strenuously denied the allegations, which were made anonymously online and then taken down.

||| Watch: The video for “Amateur”

||| Previously: “Fear” / “Become the Warm Jets”