Diamond Jubilee is the seventh studio album by Canadian band Cindy Lee, the project of musician Patrick Flegel. A triple album (double CD), it was released on 29 March 2024 on Flegel’s own label Realistik Studios, available exclusively on YouTube or for purchase from a Web 1.0-style Realistik Studios website. On 23 October 2024, it was released on Bandcamp and physical pre-orders were made available.

This is such a great album (a triple) and I can’t remember anything this long being so full of great songs since The Magnetic Fields and 69 Love Songs. Rob tipped me off about this slow burner.

Cindy Lee is Patrick Flegel’s drag persona but that doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s like a lost haul of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood songs on a lost cassette left out in the sun and then backed by the Velvet Underground. It’s such a manifesto of what can be done if you set yourself some artistic parameters to work with: All of this was made on a digital 8 track and there is little editing or over playing. Guitars are all the better for not always being perfectly in tune - it’s the performance and immediate emotion every time for me. In our times of blink and you miss it attention deficit ready popular culture, this is an expansive two hours which never feels that long and by sides 3 and 4 the music just gets increasingly powerful. A beautiful record and one of the finest of the decade.