Just in time for their 10-year anniversary, Mono return with their fifth studio album. Written and arranged with a hopeful, romantic narrative in mind, the songs string together like chapters in an epic love story. The music is naturally majestic, with Mono's trademark wall of noise crashing beautifully against the largest chamber orchestra the band has ever enlisted. The instrumentation is vast, incorporating strings, flutes, organ, piano, glockenspiel, and tympani into their standard face-melting set up.

The British pop duo's hit debut album coupled with a 10track bonus CD featuring mixes of four of the hit singlesfrom it thus far: two apiece of 'Life In Mono' (BananaRepublic Dub & Propellerheads) and 'Silicone' (Les RhythmesDigitales Mix & Mr Scruff Mix)

In association with the esteemed Wordless Music Series, MONO super-sized their already legendary live show with a 24-piece orchestra. Painstakingly recorded and mixed by famed producer Matt Bayles (Mastodon, ISIS, Minus The Bear), Holy Ground brilliantly captures every moment of whispered calm and breathless beauty with patient clarity. Included with the album is a stunning live DVD documenting the entire 90-minute performance, featuring live orchestral versions of many of MONO's most beloved songs.

Throughout their six-year career, this Japanese quartet has ascended consistently in both popularity and critical acclaim. But still elusive is the successful translation of their powerful and violently beautiful live performances to their recordings, until now. Once again recorded by Steve Albini, the album extends the cinematic drama of 2003's "Walking Cloud And Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered And The Sun Shined" while surpassing the sinister heaviness of 2002's lauded "One Step More And You Die". If "Walking Cloud" was a nuclear winter, then "You Are There" is the post-war rebirth. This band isn't heavy like Black Sabbath. They're heavy like Beethoven.

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Tokyo’s Mono is a peculiar group. While most bands offer up their sincerest and most genuine recordings in their infancy and spend the rest of their careers trying desperately to rediscover their youthful energy, Mono's trajectory has been quite the opposite. This flourish of hopeful creativity was captured by Steve Albini in the form of the eight pieces that make up their third album Walking Cloud And Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered And The Sun Shined. More lush and orchestral than previous recordings, the album couples an overall slow-melting ambience with a thunderous drive that reaches far greater heights than the band’s earlier work.

Since its original release in 2002, "One Step" has become the monolithic cornerstone of Mono's discography. Every subsequent release has been inevitably (and perhaps unfairly) compared to this album, as if it were the band's high watermark, never to be dethroned. To celebrate that release, it's being reissued and repackaged with additional artwork. Four years later it confidently sounds just as brutal and beautiful as the day it was laid to tape. "...On 'One Step More', Mono not only slay, but also punish, mutilate, and bury the listener in their escalating guitar dirges" - Alternative Press.

This collaboration with fellow Tokyo native and modern electronic composer World's End Girlfriend is a five-part sojourn of neoclassical grace and luminescence that defies lazy categorization. As dark as the bottom of the ocean and nearly as otherworldly, "Palmless" finds Mono inhabiting a magical world previously only hinted at in their most orchestral compositions. Forgoing their tendency to erupt into hellish bursts of speaker-destroying noise, Mono instead exhibits remarkable restraint, stretching song lengths past the 15-minute mark, turning barely-there crescendos into earth-shaking events. This record is a miniature panoramic view of the sea on an eerily still day, the current swaying at an impossibly lazy pace, and the sound of a thousand tiny waves crashing all at once.

In the beginning, Mono combined the ugly washes of noise pioneered by My Bloody Valentine with the beautiful, subtle guitar figures of Slint and Mogwai. Eventually, their classical influences broke through, pushing the music to structural and emotional extremes that owed as much to Wagner and Beethoven as it did Black Sabbath and Neurosis. This release contains all of Mono's rare and out of print tracks, perfectly displaying their astounding growth. All tracks have been re-mastered from their original tapes, with both CD and triple vinyl formats boasting absurdly beautiful deluxe packaging.