Electronic pop band Sylvan Esso announced today that they will be releasing their third full-length album, Free Love, on September 25 via Loma Vista Recordings. With the announcement, the duo of Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn also released a brand new music video and single, “Ferris Wheel.”

In a press release, the band explains the new video was shot during the coronavirus pandemic at an abandoned amusement park and follows Meath meandering through the park as she dances along to her own velvet pop voice set to Sanborn’s pulsing dance beats and rhythms.

Speaking about the story behind the single, the band says, “Ferris Wheel is about discovering your power and awkwardly figuring out how to wield it.”

As for Free Love, the North Carolina-natives are very proud of the 10 tracks that make up the collective album and explain that the essence behind each song is very reflective of the current place the world finds itself in.

“It’s a record about being increasingly terrified of the world around you and looking inward to remember all the times when loving other people seemed so easy, so that you can find your way back to that place,” says the band.

After the group’s first two albums drew on clearly defined roles between Ameath and Sanborn–where Ameath would write the lyrics and melodies while Sanborn tackled the chords and beats–Free Love represents a more collaborative effort that fuses the two artists’ creative talents into one, cohesive sound. The record itself does capture a certain duality, though, as it plays out in two distinctive sides: one hard and fast-paced and the other more mercurial and meditative.

Free Love was written, recorded and produced at Sylvan Esso’s own studio, which they built in the woods of North Carolina. The album will serve as the band’s follow-up effort to the 2017 acclaimed release, What Now. That album earned the duo a GRAMMY nomination for Best Dance/Electronica Album and debuted in the Top 40 of the Billboard 200.

In April, the band released the feature-length live concert film and album WITH, which captured their fall 2019 tour that included two sold out shows at both the Beacon Theatre in New York City as well as Disney Hall in Los Angeles.

Free Love track list

1. What If
2. Frequency
3. Ring
4. Ferris Wheel
5. Train
6. Free
7. Numb
8. Runaway
9. Rooftop Dancing
10.  Make It Easy

Photo credit: Sharon Alagna