Mount Eerie (aka Phil Elverum) new album, “Night Palace”, released this Friday via Elverum’s own P.W. Elverum & Sun label. Now he has shared another song from it, “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization,” and announced some new 2025 tour dates. “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” is the final single from the album and is accompanied by a music video.
Elverum had this to say about the song in a press release: “The final single to be released in advance of “Night Palace” is a break in the clouds, a clear voice bringing down an unambiguous hammer onto the ground of here and now: We live in the raw wound of a stolen continent empowered by multi-generational internalized racist destruction. Our self-serving dishonesty and subliminal ignorance will only keep us trapped as cycling perpetrators, so why not look right at the thing and give it a name? Liberate all, past and future! Start with giving up everything.”
When the album was announced, Mount Eerie shared two new songs from it, “Broom of the Wind” and “I Walk,” the former via a music video.
Thier was a third single, “I Saw Another Bird,” The last Mount Eerie album was 2019’s “Lost Wisdom pt. 2”. Which was a collaboration with singer Julie Doiron (in 2008 Elverum and Doiron previously collaborated on the Mount Eerie album “Lost Wisdom“). In 2020 he also revived his previous musical moniker, The Microphones, releasing the first album under that name in 17 years, Microphones in 2020.
Elverum directed his energy toward building a house and what he has called “basic forest maintenance” on a parcel of land on Orcas Island, Washington, where he moved with his young daughter after Elverum’s brief marriage to the actress Michelle Williams fell apart in 2019.
A press release says that “Night Palace” was written and recorded in the aftermath life-changing events, as Elverum attempted to settle into his new life. As the press release puts it: “After a natural disaster, things do grow back. A person catching their breath after a traumatic experience has a kind of reoriented clarity. Art that is made without urgency or expectation has a chance to reach beyond the usual. It was in this patient clarity that “Night Palace” came to be written and recorded from 2022 to 2024. Elverum’s life settled back down and he reassembled the old analogue reel to reel studio at his quiet deep woods home and began experimenting again.”
The video for the song “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” by Mount Eerie made by Phil Elverum, except for a couple shots by Peter J. Brant from 2014
“Night Palace”, released November 1st, 2024
The Fat Angel Sings 