The Decemberists’ new album, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again, is set to release on June 14th via YABB Records (Thirty Tigers). Marking their 9th studio album after a six-year hiatus, this remarkable double album is produced by lead singer Colin Meloy and Tucker Martine and features guest appearances from The Shins’ James Mercer and REM’s Mike Mills. Pre-orders are available today.
As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is not only the longest Decemberists album to date but also their first intentional, proper double-LP, split into four thematic sides. The 13 songs serve as semaphores of mutual recognition for our fraught times and faint hopes. Tracks like “The Reapers” explore existential slog and capitalist vexation, “America Made Me” delves into opiated delusion and jumbled jingoism, while “All I Want Is You” offers guileless tenderness and absolute surrender. This album is a redemptive testament of a band finding new communal hymns by revisiting several old modes at once. Meloy proudly declares it the best Decemberists album yet, perhaps the ultimate realization of 22 years of work. The album resonates with the urgency and ardor of the present more than ever before.
The band first teased the new album with the single “Burial Ground.” Flood Magazine declared, “The Decemberists are so back,” and Paste Magazine noted, “‘Burial Ground’ revives the band’s warm, familiar folk-rock sound.” The track features buoyant vocals by Meloy over twinkling instrumentation, with loose guitar and flourishes of horns adding a Beach Boys-style vibrancy. They followed up with a 19-minute prog rock epic titled “Joan In The Garden,” and a potent love song called “All I Want Is You.”
The Decemberists are currently on an expansive North American tour with both spring and summer legs. Highlights include The Salt Shed in Chicago on May 21st and the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on May 24th, concluding on August 3rd at McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale, OR. All tickets are on sale now, with a full list of tour dates available.
For 20 years, The Decemberists have been one of the most original, daring, and thrilling American rock bands. Founded in 2000 when singer, songwriter, and guitarist Colin Meloy moved from Montana to Portland, Oregon and met bassist Nate Query, keyboardist Jenny Conlee, and guitarist Chris Funk, The Decemberists’ distinctive brand of hyperliterate folk-rock set them apart from the start with their debut EP 5 Songs in 2001. After making their full-length debut with Castaways and Cutouts in 2002, the band signed with Kill Rock Stars for the release of acclaimed albums Her Majesty the Decemberists (2003) and Picaresque (2005), produced by Chris Walla. The 2004 EP The Tain – an 18-minute single-track epic – showcased the band’s grand creative ambitions.