La Futura
La Futura is the fifteenth studio album by American rock band ZZ Top, released on September 8, 2012. It is the band's first album in nine years, following "Mescalero", and peaked at number 5 on the "Billboard" "Top Rock Albums" chart. "La Futura" is also the last album to feature bassist Dusty Hill before his death July 28, 2021. Overview. "La Futura" was recorded at The Foambox Recordings in Houston, Texas. The album title and album art were unveiled on ZZ Top's homepage on 3 August 2012 at 11:45 a.m. The album contains 10 tracks. "We  thought long and hard about what this album should be," Gibbons said in a press release. "We wanted to recall the directness of our early stuff but not turn our backs on contemporary technology. The result of this melding of the past and the present is, of course, "La Futura"." The first four album tracks —"I Gotsta Get Paid", "Chartreuse", "Consumption" and "Over You"—were first released on 5 June 2012 as an iTunes-only collection titled "Texicali", which met with strong sales and glowing reviews. "Music Radar" summed up the tunes as "fresh, vital roadhouse blues." Another track, "Flyin' High , appropriately made its world premiere in space, when the then-unfinished song was played on board a Soyuz spacecraft during its launch to the International Space Station in June 2011 at the request of the NASA astronaut Mike Fossum, a long-time ZZ Top fan and friend. Two bonus tracks, titled Threshold of a Breakdown" and "Drive-By Lover", were released on CDs sold exclusively at Best Buy stores. Reception. Following its release, the album received mostly positive reviews. William Clark of "Guitar International" wrote, "La Futura is an impressive return to form for this infamous southern rock trio, and  includes some of the best music ZZ Top has ever pushed out." Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic also praised the album, calling it their best album since "Eliminator" in 1983, while writing that "ZZ Top are celebrating everything that they've taken for granted for decades – they're embracing the sleazy boogie, the dirty jokes, the locomotive riffs, the saturated blues, the persistent lecherous leer, and by doing so they finally sound like themselves again." Personnel. ZZ Top Additional musicians Technical personnel About the tracks. "Chartreuse" is a song about the famous French liqueur Chartreuse the band discovered (and loved ) in their dressing room in 2011 during the Musilac Music Festival in Aix-les-Bains, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France.