We’ll admit that this slipped us by, but out music legend JG Thirlwell, best known as FOETUS, has a new album out titled HIDE.

Thirlwell originally announced Hide on his website last year, but it’s only very recently that it’s become available via the Foetus website.

With sleeve art in the trademark Foetus colours of bold red, black and white, it represents the first Foetus album proper since 2005’s LOVE. The press release helpfully informs us that the Mebourne-born Thirlwell, who’s worked with Nurse with Wound, Coil, Nick Cave, Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch and tons more in his time, describes this record as a “neo-symphonic avant-psychedelic concept album informed by the culture of fear”. There might be an element of tongue against cheek there. Then again, there might not be.

In recent years, Thirlwell has been more active as a composer than a studio musician, writing string pieces for the Kronos Quartet, chamber ensemble versions of his Manorexia project, and this summer, conducting a twenty-piece orchestral version of Steroid Maximus (a long-running, mostly instrumental Thirwell project) for New York’s Celebrate Brooklyn festival. He’s also scored three seasons of Adult Swim show The Venture Bros.