Legendary psychedelic rock band Mercury Rev release their anticipated new album Born Horses on 6th September via Bella Union. The collection has already received attention from the likes of Pitchfork, Stereogum, BrooklynVegan, NME, Under The Radar, Clash, Louder Than War and more. Following the earlier singles “Patterns” and “Ancient Love”, today the band share “A Bird Of No Address”, the radiant and uplifting third track to be released from the album. Watch the visualiser HERE.

Commenting on the track Grasshopper of Mercury Rev says: “As Rebecca Solnit (poet laureate of hope) writes, ‘The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect.’ For all the birds of no address: Fly on!”

In upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley, a richly swelling, spellbound sound emerges, eddying and flowing like the local Esopus Creek, or in the slipstream of the grander Hudson River, carrying the flotsam and jetsam of our hopes, dreams, and fears. A sound composed of organic and electronic; guitars, keys, brass, strings, woodwind, drums - and a voice of incantations, tapping streams of consciousness that similarly eddy and flow.

Spiritually, literally, psycho-geographically: where else does Mercury Rev’s ninth album Born Horses spring from? This cascade of gleaming, glistening psych-jazz-folk-baroque-ambient quest that searches its soul but can never truly know the answer? A sound and vision begun with skeletal chords and surges of self-reflection, alive to the notions and motions of time and reality somehow both linked to their exalted past whilst quite unlike anything they have created before?’’

Grasshopper: “When Jonathan and I first met, one thing we bonded over was Blade Runner, both Ridley Scott’s film and Vangelis’ soundtrack: that feel of the past and the future, the haunting noir mood and the romance of the future…Born Horses taps into some of that. Looking back to childhood, to Broadway tunes, to lonesome blues, Chet Baker, Miles Davis’ Sketches Of Spain, records that our parents listened to, but we put a twist into the future. From the beginning, Mercury Rev were on a cusp, between analogue and digital, hi-fi and lo-fi at the same time. It was like Brecht or Weill, the words suggesting visuals, and the visuals suggesting moods. We also thought a lot about the desert on this record, and the urban desert.”

The album title, named after the majestically rippling sixth track ‘Born Horses’, was chosen because its words resonate through the entire record, encompassing the idea of flight (“I dreamed we were born horses waiting for wings”) and the phrase “You and I” that appears at different junctures on the album. This is not the concept of two separate people, but two parts of oneself.

Jonathan Donahue: “When I opened my voice to sing on this record, this was the bird that sang: a lower, whiskery voice, which surprised me as much as it may others. I don’t know where the bird came from, but it’s there now, and I don’t question it. It’s just the bird that wants to sing.”

Born Horses opens with ‘Mood Swings’. A trumpet, evoking bohemian mariachi and the windswept terrain of the desert prairie, opens up to a dynamic panorama of sound, wandering through and enveloping Jonathan’s intimate recitation, conflating memories and confessions of feelings trapped and unwrapped. It establishes Born Horses’ tone of vulnerability and awe, testifying to the frailty of human experience, buffeted by the currents all around us. The flightiness of feelings is further explored by the metaphor of a bird, most clearly in ‘Bird Of No Address’ and the album’s pulsating finale ‘There Has Always Been A Bird In Me’.

More inspiration was provided by the spirits of the art minimalist Tony Conrad and beat poet Robert Creeley, acolytes of progressive thought and action who both taught at the University at Buffalo, the city where the band was formed. Amongst other credentials, Conrad was a member of LaMonte Young’s Dream Syndicate along with John Cale and a close friend to The Velvet Underground. Creeley was one of the most important and influential American poets of the 20th century as well as an associate of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Black Mountain poets.

Jonathan: “Since our beginning in the late 80’s with David Baker through the recording of Born Horses with new permanent members, Woodstock native (pianist) Jesse Chandler and Austrian born (keyboardist) Marion Genser, we’ve celebrated this unspoken trust in the ‘statue already inside the marble’. We didn’t make Born Horses by throwing clay on top of clay; we allowed Time to reveal what was always there.”

Since forming in 1989, Mercury Rev has made a career out of boldly exploring the fringes of artistic perception, channelling colours and sounds and visions that always seem just beyond our mortal reach. The Guardian hailed the group as “a rarity in indie rock: a band who have continually evolved their sound, pushing at the boundaries of what rock music actually means over 25 years, borrowing from jazz, funk, doo-wop, techno, folk and more along the way,” while Rolling Stone praised their “majestic chaos”. The band’s 1991 debut, ‘Yerself Is Steam,’ landed on Pitchfork’s rundown of the Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time, and their 1998 breakthrough, ‘Deserter’s Songs,’ was named NME’s Album of the Year upon its release. Major festival and television performances around the world solidified their status as that rare group capable of straddling the line between mainstream appeal and progressive musical and technological experimentation.

Mercury Rev Live Dates:

27th October - Belfast - Mandela Hall

28th October - Limerick - Dolans Warehouse

29th October - Galway - Roisin Dub

30th October - Cork - Cyprus Avenue

31st October - Dublin - Button Factory

2nd November - Norwich - Arts Centre

3rd November - Bristol - Trinity

4th November - Newcastle - Boiler Shop

6th November - Glasgow - The Garage

7th November - Leeds - Brudenell Social Club

8th November – Cambridge - Junction

9th November - Brighton - Mutations Festival

11th November - Amsterdam - Paradiso

12th November - Leuven - Het Depot

13th November - Paris - La Maroquinerie

15th November - Weissenhauser Strand - Rolling Stone Beach Festival

16th November - Copenhagen - Bremen Theatre

17th November - Johanneshov - Slaktkyrkan

18th November - Oslo - Vulkan Arena

2025:

13th March - Liverpool - Content

14th March - Manchester - New Century Hall

18th March - Portsmouth - Wedgewood Rooms

19th March - London – EartH

Born Horses artwork and tracklist:

Mercury Rev release new single "A Bird Of No Address" from upcoming album "Born Horses" out 6th September via Bella Union

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