Shearwater announce their new album The New World, due 31st July via the band’s own Polyborus label in partnership with Secretly Distribution. Long on KLOF’s radar — from the island-haunted The Golden Archipelago onward — Jonathan Meiburg‘s outfit, now Meiburg with Emily Lee and Dan Duszynski, mark the announcement with two singles: the soulful More and More and the epic Daydream Unbeliever, the latter arriving with a video filmed and edited by Meiburg during research in Antarctica.
Daydream Unbeliever billows out with classic Shearwater grandeur. Soaring strings circle Meiburg’s voice while Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu — his collaborator on the 2010 Blue Water White Death project — crashes a gong against the song’s swelling tide. The footage Meiburg shot at the bottom of the world supplies a stark backdrop: undulating swelling broken ice, it’s vastness and and movement matched by the arrangement that sounds equally vast in scale.
Meiburg places both singles in the present unease. “If you’re like us, you wake up feeling like the world’s on fire, and hoping you could reckon with it if you knew where to begin,” he says. “‘Daydream Unbeliever’ and ‘More and More’ come from this uneasy place. If they help you feel a little less insane, welcome home.”
The New World‘s nine tracks were distilled from four years of travel, fieldwork and collaboration, with sessions spread across London, Berlin, New York and the band’s Texas headquarters. The supporting cast is exceptional: Shahzad Ismaily, saxophonist and clarinettist Doug Wieselman, qanunist Farouz Zriek, guitarist Leo Abrahams, ngonist Mamadou Kouyate, percussionists Mahamadou Tounkara and Moctar Kouyate of Malian group Ngoni Ba, and drummer Thor Harris. Duszynski engineered, with additional production from Abrahams and Danny Reisch, who also mixed the record in Los Angeles. After six albums on Sub Pop and Matador, this one is crowdfunded and self-released — an artistic risk that, on early evidence, has paid off.
Pre-Order: https://shearwater.lnk.to/TheNewWorld