Mystery Jets have announced their new album ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’ with its hazy title track – check it out below.
Read More: Five things we learned from our In Conversation chat with Mystery Jets’ Blaine Harrison
The band last released a studio album in 2020 in the form of ‘A Billion Heartbeats’, but appeared to tease a new era last week with the release of new single ‘Black Sage’. Now, they’ve shared news of their seventh studio album, with ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’ set to arrive on August 21 via Fiction Records – you can pre-order/pre-save it here.
Titled after Yoko Ono’s minimalist artwork by the same name – and, after being granted special permission by Ono herself, featuring the original work – their upcoming album described in a press release as intent on casting its gaze “back up from the void, to the cosmic again”.
Alongside the announcement, the band shared another preview of the nine-track record in the form of opening track and title piece, ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through I’ – which you can check out below.
As with the recently shared ‘Black Sage’, the track comes accompanied by a live performance filmed at the James Turrell Skyspace at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens.
The album came together in the year’s following ‘A Billion Heartbeats’, which charted the depths of the culture wars, “protests, and a very street-level perspective”.
“With protest songs and celebrations of the NHS all part of their new identity, it’s a wildly successful take on the world at large as the band enter a new decade,” NME wrote of the album in a four-star review of that album, with the forthcoming offering seeing them return with more musings on trauma, freedom and forgiveness.
Upon sharing ‘Black Sage’, frontman Blaine Harrison said its core message was that healing was “inseparable from suffering”, adding that “there is beauty to be found in the broken”.
“We’ve not written that way since the very earliest days of the band,” he continued so we knew it had to be the first track to share from this new chapter”.
‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’ album artwork. CREDIT: PRESS
‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’ tracklist is:
‘A Hole To See The Sky Through I’
‘Black Sage’
‘Doomsday Waltz’
‘God Rays’
‘Flea Joint’
‘Long Lonely Road’
‘Soul River’
‘Anaglypta’
‘A Hole To See The Sky Through II’
In 2022, the band’s bassist, Jack Flanagan, launched a solo career, releasing the album ‘Rides The Sky’, which included the psychedelic single ‘Skyhorse X Skyhorse’.
Mystery Jets also shared covers album ‘Home Protests’ in 2020. Explaining how they recorded the album in lockdown, the Jets said: “As the world ground to a halt, with global lockdowns and illnesses, we continued to protest from our homes: recording lo-fi live covers of nine timeless tracks spanning the last half-century.
“Songs tackling perennial issues from discrimination and homelessness to war, consumer capitalism and environmental destruction.”
They are due to play at The Maccabees’ show at Leeds’ Kirkstall Abbey on July 31, alongside Maximo Park and Everything Everything.
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