the innocence mission announce new album "Midwinter Swimmers" out 29th November via Bella Union || Share video for first single "This Thread Is a Green Street"

the innocence mission announce their new album Midwinter Swimmers due for release 29th November via Bella Union and available to preorder here. To accompany the announcement the band have shared a video for luminous lead single ‘This Thread Is a Green Street’ which features the beautiful and distinctive hand-drawn animation of vocalist Karen Peris. Click HERE to watch.

‘This Thread Is a Green Street’ is a perfect entrance into the innocence mission’s sound and sensibility. Karen Peris describes it as “a sort of envisioning the landscape as a world of doorways, that might allow us to locate memory or to be nearer in some way to people we miss. And the transportive quality of scenes we might come upon in the natural world, or even in everyday objects - a sewing thread when I’m mending something could remind me of a street map. One of the things about recording it was, how to find this feeling inside the sound, and how to find the half-remembered beauty of sing-alongs of our 1970’s childhoods. There’s a search in recording that goes on being elusive, in a good way.”

The first studio album from the innocence mission in four years, Midwinter Swimmers sounds immediately like an old friend. At the same time, it’s a new kind of adventure for the beloved Pennsylvania band of high school friends Karen Peris, Don Peris, and Mike Bitts, having both an expansive, cinematic quality and the strange, lo-fi beauty of a newly discovered vintage folk album. 

“It’s like it was recorded at Western Electric in the 60’s, and makes me think of Vashti Bunyan or Sibylle Baier, but also has these emotional bursts of orchestration and drums and harmony coming in - the sound of the innocence mission never stops getting richer”, writes one early listener and friend.

‘This Thread Is a Green Street’ is the first of a trio of songs on the new album (the second being the title song) about missing a loved one who is away, and of how love can transcend distance, Karen says. Piano melodies and high electric with strummed nylon string guitars make a glimmery soundtrack for ‘Midwinter Swimmers’, a happy-sad song of hopefulness about seeing an absent loved one soon. It takes place during an instant when swimmers seen at a distance through tears are refracted and appear as something beautiful and moving. Something of this feeling is echoed in the recording, made with a spontaneity and a sense of trying to capture a single moment and hold it up to the light.

This attentiveness to small detail typifies the way the innocence mission’s songs look closely at everyday moments as miraculous worlds of their own. Karen’s words stand on their own as poetry, with a particular sense of place and colour, of the visual, that communicate universal experiences of change and loss, and of love, hope, and gratitude.

The hope of personal transformation is present in ‘Orange of the Westering Sun’, which recalls being in California to record the innocence mission’s first two albums. “This was at Joni Mitchell’s house, and the air always smelled like lilies so it became Easter-like, which may have been one of the reasons that there was the feeling of being at the start of something”, Karen remembers. (In a full-circle experience, Karen, whose first favourite song at five years old was ‘Both Sides Now’ was invited by Joni to sing on her album Night Ride Home, an honour she treasures.)

On the opposite US coast, a favourite place visited by the Peris family called Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth is the setting of the dynamic and ambient ‘The Camera Divides the Coast of Maine’. Karen explains the song is “thinking about the nature of place in regard to time - when we think of going back, is it as if to visit an earlier time in our lives? I often think of the Ivan Lalic poem that says something like: Is this a street or years?”

Here, and throughout the album, there is a palpable emotion inherent in Karen’s voice, and in the distinctive combination of Don’s luminous, high electric guitar lines with Karen’s low (baritone and nylon string), rhythmic guitar and piano playing. Their longtime friend Mike Bitts adds a further dimension of upright and electric bass. “There is a companionship about Karen’s voice,” Don Peris says, “and a realistic joy and gratitude, in the midst of life’s difficulties, that she is expressing here on songs like ‘Sisters and Brothers’. I feel bolstered and comforted by them”.

Midwinter Swimmers artwork and tracklist:

1. This Thread Is a Green Street

2. Midwinter Swimmers

3. The Camera That Divides The Coast Of Maine

4. John Williams

5. We Would Meet in Center City

6. Your Saturday Picture

7. Cloud To Cloud

8. A Hundred Flowers

9. Orange Of The Westering Sun

10. Sisters And Brothers

11. A Different Day