Pacific Northwest artist Liz Harris aka Grouper has announced the release of her new album, Shade, which it will be out on October 22nd via Kranky.
The twelfth full-length by Grouper is a collection of songs spanning 15 years. She characterises Shade as an album about respite, and the coast, poetically and literally. How we frame ourselves in a landscape, how in turn it frames ourselves; memories and experiences carried forward mapping our connection to place. “— An ode to blue/ What lives in shade —”
Grouper has also unveiled the first single taken from the new album. Listen to “Unclean Mind” below:
Songs touch on loss, flaws, hiding places, love. Deep connections to the Bay Area, and the North Coast, with its unique moods of solitude, beauty, and isolation—a place described and transformed by the chaos and power of river-mouth, wild maritime storms, columns of mist that rise up unexpectedly on the road at night. Portions were recorded on Mount Tamalpais during a self-made residency years back, other pieces made longer ago in Portland, while the rest were tracked during more recent sessions in Astoria.
Throughout, Harris threads a hidden radiant language of voice, disquiet, and guitar, framed by open space and the sense of being far away. “Echoing a lighthouse, burying the faults of being human / Into things that we project upon the sky at night.”
Shade artwork & tracklist:
1. Followed the ocean
2. Unclean mind
3. Ode to the blue
4. Pale Interior
5. Disordered minds
6. The way her hair falls
7. Promise
8. Basement mix
9. Kelso (Blue sky)