Clara Mann has announced her second album, Wishbone, out October 23rd via state51, and shared the lead single, News From Home.
Where her 2025 debut Rift sat in a single strange, isolated shade of blue, Wishbone is built on contrast — a luminosity running through it, the brightest passages made legible by shadow. Mann began the album determined to imagine good things for herself and to believe they might be within reach, a decision she describes as frightening. She likens the wishbone image from Marina Abramović’s Rest Energy, the performance in which artist and partner hold a drawn bow and arrow between their bodies: total trust and the possibility of ruin in one gesture. Wanting good things, and letting other people want them for you, is worth the risk of the break.
Of the single, Mann says: “This song is a thread between a once-home landscape and my real, adult life. It’s about visiting and looking at my hometown, knowing that, whilst this used to be everything, my whole life, now I have a big wide life of my own, and things to get back to – and holding both of those next to each other, and seeing how they make each other more beautiful, and also more strange. The instrumentation is supposed to have a feeling of an old country song, slightly haunting percussion and the shimmery synth…. I thought about big wide open skies and walking over the hills at golden hour.”
Watch the accompanying visualiser shot by Louise Mason:
Fabian Prynn produced, building the album out from Mann’s demos and voice notes across a handful of intense, sometimes 14-hour days at Bam Bam Studios in Norfolk. “I was so not used to hearing my music expanded like this,” she says of first hearing Prynn’s drums on the tracks. “The purest expression of a lot of this music, as I had experienced it, had always been me alone in a big hall.” Prynn is joined by guitarist Kit Mosely and double bass player Marianne Schofield, alongside Owen Spafford on viola, Martin Egidi on cello and Tennessee Woodiel on banjo.
We’ve followed Mann since Thread was our Song of the Day in 2022. Reviewing Rift, Thomas Blake wrote that “in the space of a debut album, Clara Mann has gone from ‘one to watch’ to one of the best songwriters in the country”, praising her ability to alchemise specific experience into a universal emotional reaction “with lightness and an ear for a concise and cutting phrase”. Last October she and Spafford released a double A-side of Hedy West’s 500 Miles and Iris DeMent’s My Life.
Pre-order Wishbone on LP + CD: https://clara-mann.lnk.to/wishbone
Tour dates
15 Sept — Hamburg, Germany, Reeperbahn Festival
16 Sept — Hamburg, Germany, Reeperbahn Festival
18 Sept — Vic, Spain, MMVV
26 Sept — Montpellier, France, International Guitar Festival
30 Oct — Lucerne, Switzerland, Echolot
15 Nov — Dublin, Sugar Club
24 Nov — Edinburgh, Pianodrome
25 Nov — Manchester, Halle St Michaels
28 Nov — Bantham, Outside (Ben Howard’s venue)
29 Nov — Bristol, Lantern Theatre at Bristol Beacon
04 Dec — London, St Matthias Church