Shearwater Announce First Album in 6 Years, Share New Song “Xenarthran”: Listen

Shearwater have announced that they’re returning with their first new album since 2016’s Jet Plane and Oxbow. The Great Awakening is out June 10 via the band’s Polyborus label (in partnership with Secretly Distribution). Check out the Emily Cross–directed video for the album’s lead single “Xenarthran” below.

“Xenarthrans are the ‘strange-jointed’ mammals, which mostly live in South America: armadillos, anteaters, and sloths. Only one species of armadillo has wandered up to the southern U.S., and while we were recording The Great Awakening in Texas, I often saw them scurrying dimly through fields at dusk or snuffling in the mud after a rainstorm, and I couldn’t help admiring them,” Jonathan Meiburg said in a statement. “They’d walked thousands of miles on their wispy little feet, long noses to the ground, trundling into alien landscapes filled with unfamiliar dangers. This song, and Emily’s eerie video, aren’t about armadillos, exactly—but they are about making your way through the dark spaces of a menacing but still very beautiful world. The roaring sounds near the end are howler monkeys I recorded in Guyana.”