Fleet Foxes Drop Surprise New Album “Shore”

By
Jas C
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Fleet Foxes at the 2018 Way Out West Festival in Sweden. Photo by IBL/Shutterstock (9788690o)

Seattle’s Fleet Foxes delivered their previous promise to fans by sharing the new album Shore on Monday. The release of the record coincides with the beginning of the autumnal equinox, something that the band was obviously planning for.

The group previously teased the project over the weekend, but only made the news official several hours before the launch. Shore contains 15 songs and features a number of contributing guests, including young singer Uwade Akhere, Brazilian musician and composer Tim Bernardes, violist/violinist Marta Sofia Honer, and guitarist Michael Bloch among others.

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Album is out!  This one was an intense two-year labor of love and I’m elated that it’s out in the world now, so soon after we finished it.  Really hope it can be a 55 minute life-preserver in this ocean of bad news.  This album was almost abandoned back in April but I’m so glad it came together how it did over the summer, so glad to share it, and so glad to have some time now to make even more music, other songs that will soon enough live alongside it. Thank you so much to Kersti Jan Werdal for making an incredible full-length 16mm film companion to this album. Thank you, infinitely, to the following generous souls for their incredible hard work and beautiful contributions to this set of songs: Beatriz Artola, Joe LaPorta, Christopher Bear, Homer Steinweiss, Joshua Jaeger, Uwade Akhere, Meara O’Reilly, Tim Bernardes, Kevin Morby, Daniel Rossen, Hamilton Leithauser, Georgiana Leithauser, Frederika Leithauser, Juliet Butters, Faye Butters, Andy Clausen, Willem de Koch, Riley Mulherkar, Chloe Rowlands, Marta Sofia Honer, and Michael Bloch. Immense gratitude to Aaron Dessner, Jon Low, Bastien Lozier, Michael Harris, Chris Cerullo, Woody Jackson, Lee Foster, Lauren Marquez, Paul Spring, and Jens Jungkurth, for opening your studio doors to us and for helping us bring this music to life. Thank you also, so much, to Brian Wilson, for letting us use a small snippet of his studio dialog in a track, oh and for changing my life forever. Thank you as well to the estate of Hiroshi Hamaya for the use of his beautiful images.  His sun-streaked river delta, light entwining dark, abstract but natural, energetic in detail but calm and assured in total, is the perfect accompanying image to this varied collection of songs. Thank you to Benjamin Tousley, Kersti Jan Werdal, and Dino Matt for their help designing and realizing the album artwork. Thank you infinitely to Casey Wescott, Skyler Skjelset, Christian Wargo, and Morgan Henderson for their friendship and collaboration over these many years. So many others to thank, but I’ll save it for the next post.  More music to come. Enjoy!

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According to the frontman Robin Pecknold, the album was in the works since September 2018, and Fleet Foxes only finished the recording earlier this month. Pecknold cites Arthur Russell, Nina Simone, and Sam Cooke as artists that inspired the sound of the record.

“I see shore as a place of safety on the edge of something uncertain, staring at Whitman’s waves reciting ‘death’,” said Pecknold in the press release. “Tempted by the adventure of the unknown at the same time, you are relishing the comfort of the stable ground beneath you. This was the mindset I found, the fuel I found, for making this album.”

Alongside the album Shore, Fleet Foxes also released an accompanying film of the same name that was directed by Kersti Jan Werdal. The film contains landscapes of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, that “resonate with the music” on the group’s new release. You can check it out on YouTube.