Laura Veirs returns on 14th August with Temple Songs, her fourteenth solo album, released via her own label Raven Marching Band Records. Following her self-recorded 2023 voice-memo collection Phone Orphans and last year’s Laura Veirs And The Choir Who Couldn’t Say (Live In Angoulême), Temple Songs is the most self-contained project of Veirs’s three-decade career: written, recorded, arranged, produced and performed entirely alone, with the sole exception of saxophone from a secret guest.
The album takes its name from the ‘Temple of Bloom’, the backyard studio Veirs built at her Portland, Oregon home. Working there over three months in autumn 2025 with two microphones and a laptop, she dispensed with click tracks and electronic instruments and embraced wabi-sabi — no pitch correction, rough edges left intact. The room itself became a collaborator: rain on the skylight, neighbourhood bluejays, passing crows and a distant stump grinder were either incorporated or worked around. Philip Weinrobe, who recently mixed Adrienne Lenker, handles the final touches.
Lead single “Flying Into Darkness” arrives with a video Veirs filmed herself while on tour in France. “This song comes from a feeling of being existentially unmoored in a dark, uncertain moment,” she explains. “I kept circling the same questions: how do I stay grounded? How do I feel like I’m doing some real good, nudging things — even slightly — in a better direction? At its core, the song wrestles with restlessness — how hard it is to find true rest when the world keeps us in a constant state of unease. There’s also a thread of ‘No Masters’ running through it, which shows up across the album. I’m reaching for a world shaped more by freedom and love than by greed and fear, and all the ways those forces show up in daily life: hollow work, vast inequality, systems that feel too big to push against, and the steady backdrop of violence and conflict.”
Across eleven tracks, Temple Songs moves between delicate nylon-string fingerpicking and bolder electric flourishes, with Pulse culminating in a cacophonous duet between electric guitar and sax, and Sunlight and Doom incorporating fragments from the ancient Greek lyricist Sappho. Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney calls the record “achingly beautiful,” adding that “finding inner strength during the roughest of times is perhaps the greatest act of resistance.”
Veirs heads to the UK and Ireland in September with longtime tourmate Karl Blau in support.
Save/Pre-Order: https://lnk.to/templesongs
Laura Veirs UK & Ireland tour dates:
10th September – Cambridge, UK @ Storey’s Field Centre
11th September – Sheffield, UK @ Upper Chapel
12th September – Newcastle, UK @ Cluny 2
13th September – Glasgow, UK @ Saint Luke’s
14th September – Manchester, UK @ St. Michael’s
16th September – London, UK @ Earth
17th September – Southampton, UK @ Papillon
18th September – Bristol, UK @ Strange Brew
19th September – Birmingham, UK @ Kitchen Garden Café *(SOLD OUT!)*
20th September – Nottingham, UK @ Old Cold Store
22nd September – Galway, IE @ Monroe’s
23rd September – Dublin, IE @ Whelan’s
24th September – Belfast, UK @ The Black Box
25th September – Kilkenny, IE @ Cleere’s