Shearwater announced the release of a new album, “The Great Awakening”, which will be out on June 10th via the band’s Polyborus label in partnership with Secretly Distribution. The band also shared a video for the album’s lead single, “Xenarthran,” which wouldn’t sound out of place on a Talk Talk album.
Emily Cross directed the video. Frontman Jonathan Meiburg and Cross are also both in the band Loma together.
In a press release Meiburg elaborates on the new song: “Xenarthrans are the ‘strange-jointed’ mammals, which mostly live in South America: armadillos, anteaters, and sloths. Only one species of armadillo has wandered up to the southern U.S., and while we were recording “The Great Awakening” in Texas, I often saw them scurrying dimly through fields at dusk or snuffling in the mud after a rainstorm, and I couldn’t help admiring them. They’d walked thousands of miles on their wispy little feet, long noses to the ground, trundling into alien landscapes filled with unfamiliar dangers.”
“This song, and Emily’s eerie video, aren’t about armadillos, exactly—but they are about making your way through the dark spaces of a menacing but still very beautiful world. The roaring sounds near the end are howler monkeys I recorded in Guyana.”
we’re sharing “Laguna Seca’ , the third single from THE GREAT AWAKENING. JM says: “Laguna Seca’ came from one of those dreams where you meet someone you know, but they aren’t themselves. And then you realize that you’re not yourself, either.”
This is Shearwater’s seventh studio album, produced by the band and Dan Duszynski (Loma), shows us where its wandering frontman has been. While the thundering songs of the band’s 2016 LP Jet Plane and Oxbow (Sub Pop) were filled with fears for what the United States was becoming under the previous presidential administration, Meiburg resolved to find a new approach for “The Great Awakening”. “I felt hopeless,” he admits. “And I didn’t want to make hopeless music.“
“The Great Awakening” is a soulful and immersive travelogue of grand atmospheres and intimate landscapes, decorated with field recordings from Meiburg’s journey while writing his critically acclaimed debut book, A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey, released in March 2021 by Knopf.
The resultant 11-track album—anchored by Meiburg’s closely-recorded voice, more otherworldly and urgent than ever—is one that Shearwater’s been striving toward for years: a journey into the unknown, embracing sorrow and joy, beauty and terror.
Shearwater’s last album, “Jet Plane and Oxbow”, came out in 2016 via Sub Pop
The Fat Angel Sings 