Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	75/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Clash	7/10
The Guardian
The Independent
Mojo
musicOMH
NME	5/10
Pitchfork Media	6.1/10
PopMatters	7/10
Slant Magazine

Tales of Us is the sixth studio album by English electronic music duo Goldfrapp, released on 6 September 2013 by Mute Records. In June 2013, the duo embarked on the Tales of Us Tour to promote the album.

Goldfrapp began recording their sixth studio album in April 2011, recording in the English countryside, then mixing in London. A re-launch of the band's official website was synchronised with the announcement, which featured a video trailer directed by Lisa Gunning. The duo debuted songs from Tales of Us at the Manchester International Festival on 17 and 18 July 2013.

The track "Drew" premiered on 15 July 2013 on Lauren Laverne's BBC Radio 6 Music morning show. On the same day, the full Lisa Gunning-directed "Drew" music video was uploaded to the duo's website and to YouTube. "Thea" was released on 24 March 2014 as the first official single from the album.

On 20 January 2014, Goldfrapp announced a one-off screening of their thirty-minute film anthology Tales of Us, which was shown by Arts Alliance Media in select theatres across the UK, Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand on the evening of 4 March. Co-created by Alison Goldfrapp and Gunning, the film follows five characters—Stranger, Laurel, Jo, Drew and Annabel—and spans themes of love, loss, madness and identity. The film was followed immediately by an exclusive live performance by Goldfrapp transmitted into cinemas from AIR Studios in London.

The song "Annabel" was inspired by Kathleen Winter's 2010 novel of the same name, about an intersex child being raised as a boy. Gunning, who directed the video for the song, optioned feature-film rights to the novel in 2014. "Clay" is based on a letter written by World War II veteran Brian Keith to his lover, another soldier known as "Dave".

Tales of Us received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 75, based on 26 reviews.AllMusic wrote that although "Tales of Us isn't as immediate as, say, Supernature", it is "Goldfrapp's most sophisticated work to date, and one of their most consistently satisfying albums." Jordan Mainzer of musicOMH viewed the album's aesthetic as "striking" and "noticeably starker than anything [Goldfrapp have] made before", concluding, "This is real music, about real people, dealing in real emotion. That it sounds so gorgeously lush too is mere icing on a very rich cake." Andy Gill of The Independent stated, "The delicate guitar and piano figures and the sombre languor of strings behind Alison Goldfrapp's breathy vocals create something akin to a cross between the dreamlike mythopoeism of old folk tales and the lush cinematic arrangements of Michel Legrand."

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Wikipedia