This week saw Phoenix make an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, teaming up with Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig to perform their new single ‘Tonight’.

The five-piece French band performed live on Colbert’s New York soundstage, while Koenig’s part comes via synchronised video. It’s appears that his “performance” is the same footage used in the song’s official music video, with Koenig riding in the passenger’s seat of a taxi driving through Tokyo.

Have a look at the performance below:

‘Tonight’ was released as a single last Wednesday (September 7), marking the first time Phoenix had welcomed in a guest vocalist, and our third preview of the band’s upcoming ‘Alpha Zulu’ album. It followed the title track, which arrived in June, and lead single ‘Identical’ from 2020. The album itself – Phoenix’s seventh, following up on 2017’s ‘Ti Amo’ – will be out on Loyauté and Glassnote on November 4.

Notably, Phoenix recorded ‘Alpha Zulu’ in Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which sits in the Palais du Louvre. On its significance, guitarist/keyboardist Laurent Brancowitz said in a press release: “We felt it would be a fantastic adventure to create something out of nothing in a museum. And so with the pandemic, we could live exactly this scene, to be alone in an empty museum.”

“I was a bit afraid, when there was too much beauty around us, that to create something could be a bit hard,” added guitarist Christian Mazzalai. “But it was the opposite: we couldn’t stop producing music. In these first 10 days, we wrote almost all of the album.”

Phoenix are currently on tour in North America, performing in Philadelphia tonight (September 15) and Washington, DC tomorrow (September 16). They’ll play a further 12 shows from there, before heading to the UK and Europe in November. Find tickets for the band’s one-off London show (scheduled for November 16 at the O2 Academy Brixton) here, and for the remaining American dates here.