Phish Shares Title Track From New Album, 'Evolve', Talks Sphere With 'Washington Post' [Listen] (2024)

AsPhish prepares to become the second band to perform at Las Vegas, NV’sSphere next week, the quartet has released the title track from its forthcoming 16th studio album, Evolve, due out on Friday, July 16th via the band’s JEMP Records. A new interview with the band in theWashington Post also sheds some additional light on the record and answers a few burning questions about the band’s Sphere stand.

The new Phish single, “Evolve”, quietly arrived on streaming platforms late Wednesday evening. The song will likely be familiar to fans of the band: “Evolve” was first played live by Phish in the summer of 2021 in Nashville and has made 13 total setlist appearances to date. The studio version of “Evolve”—written by Trey Anastasio,Tom Marshall, andScott Herman—features a string ensemble that adds a regal quality to the upbeat, optimistic sing-along.

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While reports of a new Phish album in the works co-produced by Sigma Oasis (2020) producer Vance Powell have circulated since late last year, the newWashington Post interview provides the first concrete details on the record. As the feature notes of the upcoming Sphere run, “Phish will sweep into town on April 18, intent on playing about 80 songs over the course of four concerts, repeating none. And yes, that will include most of the new material from Evolve, an album fans won’t hear until its July release. (The title track drops Thursday.)” Listen to “Evolve”, the title track from the next Phish studio album, below.

Phish – “Evolve”

TheWashington Post interview, which features quotes from Trey Anastasio (guitar, vocals),Page McConnell (keys, vocals), and the band’s co-creative director, Abigail Rosen Holmes,touches on various topics pertaining to Phish’s debut Sphere run including the decision not to add more shows (“It’ll be good [if you add more].” Holmes told Anastasio, “But it won’t be great. If you just do four nights, it’s going to blow minds”); the band’s desire not to fall into the cliché of Vegas residency nostalgia (“There is a quality of Vegas where older bands go to play their old album, to make a lot of money late in the twilight of their career,” Trey said. “That’s not what we’re interested in”); Trey’s “control freak” nature (“There was a time when we started doing these New Year’s gigs,” McConnell said, “where we’d all four be together, and all the management would all sit in a room and have multiple meetings of all of us, and eventually that kind of wore down to just Trey taking that on himself”); and the guitarist’s relentlessly team-oriented attitude (“Anastasio has a mantra, ‘Teams win,’ that he repeats more than 10 times in a two-hour interview.”)

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Anastasio and Holmes also confirm in theWashington Post interviewthat the four Phish Sphere shows will be “linked by a theme,” though neither go into detail on that front. As Rosen notes regarding the creative development of the band’s Sphere spectacle, “I said, ‘What do you think this is? Do you think this is one of those New Year’s productions or is this a Phish show in a great new environment?’ And his thought is that it’s a Phish show in a great new environment. And so that’s sort of how we framed thinking about all of the creative choices we’ve made. We wanted to absolutely make the most out of the room and also support Phish doing what Phish does best.”

The piece goes on to talk about the venue-dictated updates to the band’s typical production (“Kuroda, the light master, would be on hand to work with Holmes. But Phish’s usual rig wouldn’t fit into the Sphere”) and the arduous process of fine-tuning the venue’s novel audio setup by sound manGarry Brown (“With the help of the Sphere staff, he crafted a miniaturized version of the venue in Rock Lititz, Phish’s regular rehearsal space in central Pennsylvania.”)

“I don’t know what limitations U2 put on themselves, but obviously with them being the first one in the building, it was a learning experience,” said Brown. “With my mini-Sphere, I could technically go in, sit in section 201, which is all the way left, you know, far away, all the way over. And I could technically sit there and place the instruments where I felt they could work. And then I could move around to 13 different seats in the venue digitally, to see if what I was doing was working. And so I’ve created a soundscape that is a lot wider than what U2 did.”

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Trey also spoke about seeing U2 at Sphere during the venue’s inaugural residency and how that experience shaped Phish’s approach. “A longtime fan, Anastasio admired the way U2 commanded the arena,” theWashington Post wrote, “but he knew the Phish gig would have to be different. Take those hero shots of Bono and the Edge, looming large on the LED wrap as they strutted the stage. ‘It suited Bono because he is that kind of star,’ says Anastasio. ‘But that’s not me. I don’t do that. And same with Edge. There’s one song where he just rocks into the camera. He steps forward and he’s 800-feet high on the wall. I’m not going to do that.”

Read the fullWashington Post interview with Trey Anastasio, Page McConnell, and Abigail Rosen Holmes about the new Phish album and the band’s upcoming Sphere residency here.

For those not heading to Las Vegas themselves, Phish will offer the first-ever livestreams from Sphere on April 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st. While U2 did mount a brief broadcast from Sphere during the 2024 Grammy Award ceremony, none of the band’s 40 performances were streamed in full. Order your single-day Phish Sphere webcast or discounted four-night bundle here to take part in the first-ever Sphere livestream experience. In the lead-up to Phish’s Sphere debut, fans can dig into soundboard recordings of each of the band’s live shows dating back to 2003 via the band’s LivePhish+ subscription streaming service. For more information or to subscribe to LivePhish+, head here.

[Editor’s Note: Live For Live Music is a LivePhish affiliate.Ordering your Phish Sphere webcast or LivePhish+ subscription via the links on this page helps support our coverage of Phish and the world of live music as a whole. Thank you for reading!]