Zach Condon announces the release of the largest and most unexpected Beirut album to date. Out April 18th on his own Pompeii Records, A Study of Losses is an 18-track odyssey commissioned by Swedish circus Kompani Giraff, for an acrobatic stage show of the same name. As a free interpretation of Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, the novel by German author Judith Schalansky, A Study of Losses journeys through eleven songs and seven extended instrumental themes, named after the lunar seas and inspired by the chilling tale of a man obsessed with archiving all of humanity’s lost thoughts and creations. Like Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, A Study of Losses finds Condon writing about disappearance, preservation and the impermanence of everything known to us – extinct animal species, lost architectural and literary treasures, the process of aging and other abstract concepts. But musically, he is re-immersed in choir, renaissance and other early styles that have inspired his work, as well as variations of sounds and ideas that draw upon one of his all-time favorite records, the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs. 

“Guericke’s unicorn is a supposed reconstruction of a fossil unicorn which was actually created from the bones of a bunch of different animals like the wooly mammoth and a narwhal. It’s worth looking up the image.

I’ve always been fascinated by these kinds of bizarre chapters and odd side notes of history, and I wanted to reflect the unorthodox / eccentric madness of that ‘unicorn’ in a more playful song that is somewhat disjointed from the rest of the album. I think my music can have that disjointed / chaotic tendency in general, but with the whole album otherwise being somewhat uniformly baroque inspired, ‘Guericke’s Unicorn’ really makes for an outlier on this record, having its origin in an old modular synth experiment of mine.”

–Zach Condon

A Study of Losses is the second new Beirut album in just two years, and the continuation of another characteristically prolific chapter for Zach Condon. Following half a decade spent recovering from persistent throat issues and impending mental collapse – leaving him questioning whether he would ever perform in front of an audience again – A Study of Losses arrives on the heels of Hadsel, which marked “a new beginning for Beirut,” praised Pitchfork, calling it “a record born of despair and solitude that still feels full of life.” Whereas Hadsel was centered around a towering, antique church organ that Condon discovered during a dark arctic winter in Northern Norway, A Study of Losses is brightened by string quartets and arrangements from cellist and “No No No” collaborator Clarice Jensen.

Written and recorded by Zach Condon in both Berlin, DE and Stokmarknes, NO, with the album’s roots spanning Sweden and Germany, A Study of Losses also expands the wide world that he has built through the music of Beirut, ever since he first began the project as a curious and itinerant 14-year-old. “When I was first approached about writing a soundtrack for a circus, a certain amount of ‘Elephant Gun’ era trauma initially came rushing up,” as Condon explained, when sharing A Study of Losses’ “Caspian Tiger” at the end of 2024. “I had been pigeon-holed for years as a whimsical circus waif, full of sepia-toned images of penny farthings and perhaps lion tamers with handlebar moustaches. It couldn’t have been further from how I pictured the music I was making. Ironic then, that I found Kompani Giraff’s project so enticing.”