New York psych-folk outfit Woods have announced their next album. “Perennial” is out September 15th on the band’s own Woodsist label. To go with the LP news, the band has shared two new songs, “Between the Past” and “White Winter Melody.” The former cut has been released with a colorful visual directed by Ian McNaughton.
Woods composed “Perennial” in stages; first with Jeremy Earl’s drum loops and passages of guitar and keyboard. Earl then elaborated on those sketches with bandmates Jarvis Taveniere and John Andrews, who joined Earl at his New York Home before the songs were finished at the Panoramic House studio in Stinson Beach, California—where Woods tracked their 2020 LP, “Strange to Explain”. The album title was inspired by flora, specifically perennial plants, which Earl called “nature’s loops” in press materials.
“Perennial” is the sound of a band on the edge of their 20th anniversary and still finding bold new ways to sound like (and challenge) themselves. “Perennial” grew from a bed of guitar/keyboard/drum loops by Woods head-in-chief Jeremy Earl, a form of winter night meditation that evolved into an unexplored mode of collaborative songwriting. With Earl’s starting points, he and bandmates Jarvis Taveniere and John Andrews convened, first at Earl’s house in New York, then at Panoramic House studio in Stinson Beach, California, site of sessions for 2020’s “Strange To Explain“.
With a view of the sparkling Pacific and tape rolling, they began to build, jamming over the loops, switching instruments, and developing a few dozen building blocks.
Emerging from the process alongside the music was Earl’s reflection that “perennial plants and flowers are nature’s loops,” an idea rolling under the album’s lyrics like the loops themselves. It certainly applies to the band, too, who have quietly tended to a long, committed project of being a band in the weird-ass 21st century, both individually and communally. Though separated by coasts, the communal sprit carries through Earl, Taveniere, and Andrews’ collaboration, a living embodiment of the freedoms rediscovered every time a new collectively created piece of music emerges.
For nearly two decades, Woods have survived subgenres, anchored in the fertile soil below hashtags like lo-fi and freak-folk and psychedelic and indie, and built a shared history that’s something to marvel at.
From the album “Perennial” out September 15th on Woodsist.
The Fat Angel Sings 