Gravity Stairs is the eighth studio album by Australian rock band Crowded House, released on 31 May 2024 through Lester Records and BMG Rights Management. It was preceded by the release of the lead single "Oh Hi" on 8 February 2024. The album received favourable reviews from critics.
The band produced the album with Steven Schram,[3] with frontman Neil Finn stating that the band wanted to maintain a "dreamy quality" on the record yet be more "lyrically direct".[4] Lead single "Oh Hi" was inspired by Finn's work for the nonprofit organisation So They Can, which builds schools in remote areas of Kenya and Tanzania.[5] Finn named the album after a stone staircase near a place he vacations, which he compared to his mentality as a musician, calling the title a "metaphor for getting a little older and becoming aware of your own mortality, your own physicality" as there is "more determination needed to get to the top, but there's still the same compulsion to climb".[5] The cover art is a pastiche of the Beatles' 1966 album Revolver[6] drawn by Nick Seymour.[7]
Gravity Stairs received a score of 73 out of 100 on review aggregator Metacritic based on five reviews, which the website categorised as "generally favorable" reception.[8]Mojo's Andy Fyfe called the album "the most Crowded House thing that Crowded House have made in 30 years" as "'Teenage Summer', 'Oh Hi' and particularly 'All That I Can Ever Own' and 'The Howl' effortlessly withstand direct comparison with the band's mid-'90s peak".[10] John Murphy of MusicOMH summarised it as "a welcome reminder that the Finn family are still going strong, with upbeat, breezy numbers set against languid, deliberately paced tracks".[11]
Damian Jones of Classic Rock wrote that "gone (for the most part) are the familiar pop hooks that dominated [the band's] early records, exchanged for more thoughtful, complicated arrangements as frontman Neil Finn contemplates his own mortality".[9]Uncut felt that "Crowded House's eighth studio release ticks all the expected boxes. Pitch-perfect harmonies and inventive chord sequences abound. [...] Where it falls short, perhaps, is the absence of the full-blooded radio-friendly hits of old, although the shuffling 'All That I Can Ever Own' is a close cousin to 1993's 'Distant Sun'".[12]
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