Shearwater Announce New Album The Great Awakening For June; Share Lead Single “Xenarthran”

After six long years, Shearwater today announced their new upcoming record The Great Awakening, which will be released on June 10th via the band’s own Polyborus label. The band also shared their new lead single “Xenarthran.” The calming video to the single was directed by Emily Cross.

After their 2016 record Jet Plane and Oxbow was inspired by the political climate during that year, The Great Awakening promises a shift in style, “I felt hopeless,” frontman Jonathan Meiburg admits. “And I didn’t want to make hopeless music.” According to the press release, the album emerged “as a meditation on hope amid hopelessness, and the freedoms to be found—or dreamed about—in isolation.”

The lead single is inspired by nature and making your way through the darkness. Meiburg says about the song, “Xenarthrans are the ‘strange-jointed’ mammals, which mostly live in South America: armadillos, anteaters, and sloths.” He further indicates, “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.”

The video shows nature and it provides a very calming effect on the audience, which harmonizes perfectly with the soft sounds of the song. They blend together and lift the listeners mind a bit higher and might even offer a bit of comfort and peace.

While this might be the band’s  first album in six years, that doesn’t mean they were quite the entire time. Just last year, Emily Lee participated in Two Minutes To Late Night’s cover of Toto’s “Hold The Line.”

Check out the track listing and album art of The Great Awakening below.

The Great Awakening Tracklist:
1. Highgate
2. No Reason
3. Xenarthran
4. Laguna Seca
5. Everyone You Touch
6. Empty Orchestra
7. Milkweed
8. Detritivore
9. Aqaba
10. There Goes The Sun
11. Wind Is Love