“Leonardo DiCaprio released a movie with the exact same storyline. It was as if he’d bugged the room! We scrapped the whole thing”: When fate intervened to destroy an art-rock record, its creators wrote an album about fate

Gazpacho 2025.

Norwegian art-rockers Gazpacho have returned with their first LP in five years. Magic 8-Ball is a concept album consisting of what keyboard player Thomas Andersen calls eight “short stories about people who find themselves in extraordinary situations.”

The album’s title is taken from the spherical toy that offers up a set of random phrases every time it’s shaken, so the user can employ fate, the gods or luck to help make decisions – a reference to the album’s overall theme. “Each story is about a roll of the dice,” says Anderson. “You could say the people in the songs are victims of randomness.”