Sturgill Simpson Announces ‘Sound & Fury’ Album, Anime Film

Sturgill Simpson's anticipated new album won't be only an album. The Americana star announced on Saturday (July 20) that his next project, Sound & Fury, is coming this fall and will be accompanied by an original Japanese anime film.

Simpson revealed his plans during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, featuring the artist and two of the filmmakers: writer, director and Kamikaze Douga animation studio founder Jumpei Mizusaki and character designer and Afro Samurai creator Takashi Okazaki. The film Sound & Fury is set to music from the album of the same name, with each song receiving its own segment; Simpson provided the story and produced the movie. Readers can see the trailer for the movie, which will be on Netflix, above.

"We went in without any preconceived notions and came out with a really sleazy, steamy, rock 'n' roll record. It’s definitely my most psychedelic. And also my heaviest," says Simpson, who also produced the Sound & Fury album. "I had this idea that it’d be really cool to animate some of these songs, and we ended up with a futuristic, dystopian, post-apocalyptic samurai film."

Further details on Simpson's Sound & Fury project are forthcoming. Fans have been waiting for Simpson's fourth album since he released the lauded A Sailor's Guide to Earth in 2016. That record won Best Country Album at the Grammy Awards and received plenty of critical and fan acclaim.

Sound & Fury isn't Simpson's only recent foray into film: He'll play a cop in the forthcoming new movie Queen & Slim, contributed a song to and makes an appearance in the zombie film The Dead Don't Die, and had a role in the CBS All Access show One Dollar. The singer joked to late-night TV host Seth Myers in 2018 that acting is his "mid-life crisis."

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