London-based songwriter Elanor Moss has announced her debut album, The Knife, The Needle, out August 21st on Merge Records, alongside a new single and video for Sarah Waiting in the Car.
News of the album follows Moss’s signing to Merge last November and Again, My Love, its first taster, and builds on the ground she broke with her Citrus and Cosmic EPs and 2022’s Sorry Song. Across nine songs, the album is described rendering joy and pain in exquisite peals of psych-folk, her darkly-dreamed vignettes treating healing as a process rather than an object one obtains.
Getting there took three years. Moss recorded an entirely different version of the album in New York City — “a bit rollocking,” she notes — then set it aside, decamping to a cabin near her parents’ house in the Scottish highlands to chase a sound she describes as “quieter, weirder, more English.” She rerecorded with producer and engineer Pete Miles. “Nothing felt right,” she says of the fallow period before, “so I took the pressure off myself and tried to calibrate my relationship with songwriting and music.” Raymond Carver’s short stories and a return to therapy-fed the writing.
Sarah Waiting in the Car was the first song written for the record and, Moss says, “the north star of the album in a way.” Her contemplative guitar sits within Matthew Herd‘s arrangement for a small ensemble — Marcus Hamblett and Jool Owen on horns, Andrew Stuart-Buttle and Reid Jenkins on violin, Linus Fenton on double bass and Herd on saxophone — as the lyric turns from a meeting at a bar to the aftermath of an abusive relationship.
This is sure to be an album on many end-of-year lists. If you’ve never heard Elanor Moss before, this new single will send you reeling. She lays it all down…sounding achingly beautiful, at odds with the violence in lyrics:
Then you take me by the kitchen sink
Fist around my neck
Housemates home and everything
But no-ones noticed yet
The accompanying video was produced and directed by Matthew Thorne and the cinematographer was Tasos Chatzis:
The Knife, The Needle (August 21st, 2026) Merge Records
Pre-Order The Knife, The Needle
Moss plays a UK headline tour this autumn.
Elanor Moss Tour Dates:
Tue. June 9 – Corfe Castle, UK @ Sandy Hill Arts *
Wed. June 10 – Norwich, UK @ Norwich Arts Centre *
Wed. June 24 – Mariefred, SE @ Skottvångs Grufva +
Thu. June 25 – Lund, SW @ Park Live
Fri. June 26 – Gothenburg, SW @ Ringön
Sat. Aug. 29 – Little Mongeham, UK @ Smugglers Festival
Thu. Oct. 1 – Glasgow, UK @ The Poetry Club
Fri. Oct. 2 – Leeds, UK @ The Attic
Sat. Oct. 3 – Manchester, UK @ Low Four Studio
Sun. Oct. 4 – Stroud, UK @ The Prince Albert
Tue. Oct. 6 – Birmingham, UK @ Hare & Hounds
Wed. Oct. 7 – Bristol, UK @ The Jam Jar
Thu. Oct. 8 – Cardiff, UK @ Chapter Arts Centre
Fri. Oct. 9 – Oxford, UK @ Common Ground
Sat. Oct. 10 – Ashburton, UK @ Field System
Sun. Oct. 11 – Brighton, UK @ The Folklore Rooms
Thu. Dec. 3 – London, UK @ Cecil Sharp House
* supporting Ye Vagabonds
+ supporting Amanda Bergman