Hrishikesh Hirway has announced his debut LP, In the Last Hour of Light, alongside lead single Stray Dogs (with Iron & Wine), due April 24th via Keeled Scales.
Known for making music as The One AM Radio and as the creator and host of the award-winning podcast and Netflix series Song Exploder, Hirway returns to recording under his own name for the first time since the 2022 EP Rooms I Used to Call My Own — and does so with considerable reinforcement. The album was produced by Grammy-nominated Phil Weinrobe (Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker) and features an expansive cast of collaborators, including Kevin Morby, Jenny Owen Youngs, Fenne Lily, Vagabon, Melina Duterte of Jay Som, El Kempner of Palehound, and Jon Natchez of The War on Drugs.
Stray Dogs offers an immediate sense of the album’s emotional register: a gentle, upbeat folk song with Sam Beam’s characteristic layered harmonies drifting warmly through the mix. Its origins are quietly remarkable. Hirway wrote it in 2023, days before a songwriting retreat in Wimberley, Texas, after reaching out to friends for prompts in case inspiration dried up. Beam offered one: “describe a street you grew up on from the point of view of a stray dog.” The prompt unlocked a memory from 1987 — an eight-year-old Hirway in Saswad, his mother’s hometown in India, watching stray dogs move through the streets with a freedom he hadn’t expected. Years later, that image fused with another: aimlessly driving from New Haven to New York in the summer of 1998, running with his own pack of teenage friends.
“His vocals, to me, are the sound of my friends,” Hirway says of Beam. “Joyful, reckless, racing, and beautiful.”
The album itself draws from a longer arc of grief and time — songs written in the shadow of his mother’s death, in hospital waiting rooms, and in the quiet reckoning with a life lived fully and still slipping forward.
Hrishikesh Hirway releases In the Last Hour of Light April 24 via Keeled Scales.
Pre-Order/Save: https://lnk.to/inthelasthouroflight