Jim James has announced Wowed Out, his fifth solo album, due 28th August via ATO Records. The first single, Come Again, is out now with an official music video on YouTube — watch it below.
The album has an unusual origin. In the early 2010s, James composed a large body of music for two film-scoring projects alongside his longtime friend, award-winning composer Brian Reitzell — known for his work with director Sofia Coppola on films including Lost in Translation and The Virgin Suicides. That music was shelved, and stayed shelved for years. Then, in the autumn of 2025, James began sifting through the archive. “For years I kept returning to all this music we’d made and couldn’t figure out what to do with it,” he says. “But for some reason, last year everything started flowing in a really beautiful way.”
The title is James’s own coinage for a kind of sensory overload — the numbing effect of a world that runs permanently at maximum stimulation. The album, produced entirely by James and mixed in collaboration with Emily Lazar, pushes back against that. It sets its existential concerns against what the press materials describe as a “gorgeously transportive sonic backdrop,” shifting between ethereal atmospheres and moments of more direct, folk-leaning warmth.
Lead single “Come Again” grew out of a feeling of discouragement at the direction of things — and the need to keep looking for joy in spite of it. “You’ve got to just keep going and keep trying again and again and again to find joy,” James says.
Video Credits:
Concept, Analog Videographic Illusions, and Editing by W.G. Rickel and Cinematography, Camera Operator, and Tech Wrangling by Ben Baptist.
James plea for us to become less distracted by technology and more connected to reality is a message that many need to hear if we are to make this a better world: “We’re surrounded by all this technology that’s supposed to be so world-changing and amazing, but a lot of the time it just leaves people feeling disconnected,” James says. “I really believe there’s another path through all this insanity, and it starts with putting down our phones, taking care of ourselves, being kind to other people. We need to be wowed by what’s actually real, like nature and love and music – these things that almost everyone has access to, and that still have the power to truly move us.”
Wowed Out is James’s first solo album in eight years, following 2018’s Uniform Distortion and its companion piece Uniform Clarity. As frontman of My Morning Jacket, James has been a fixture of American rock for more than 25 years; as a solo artist, producer, and collaborator, his credits span records by Basia Bulat, Dean Wareham, and Preservation Hall Jazz Band, among others.
Wowed Out (28th August 2026) ATO Records
Pre-Order/Save: https://atorecords-ffm.com/wowedout_album