Having teased their first new music in four years last week with the seismic, reverb-drenched single ‘Black Sage’, cult London band Mystery Jets have announced details of their seventh studio album. A Hole To See The Sky Through arriving 21st August via Fiction Records.
Titled after Yoko Ono’s minimalist masterpiece of the same name, and featuring the original work – a simple white postcard with a circle cut out – on its album cover having been granted special permission by the artist herself, A Hole To See The Sky Through finds the band fighting fear with the best tools they have: imagination, joy, and the sort of boundless, irresistible melodies that have kept them at the heart of British guitar music for the past 20 years.
Alongside the announcement, the band have shared another preview of the nine-track record in the form of opening track and title piece, ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through I’. Packed with the band’s signature hooks and an instantly infectious chorus, it’s a track destined to delight longtime Mystery Jets fans and linger in your head long after the first listen. As per ‘Black Sage’, the song is accompanied by a live performance video filmed at the James Turrell Skyspace at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens. Both videos were directed by James Slater, who has previously worked with Yard Act, Blossoms and Sam Fender.
Written over the years since their 2020 last release, and then recorded with producer Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Wild Beasts, Frightened Rabbit) at his East London HQ, A Hole To See The Sky Through is filled with ideas of freedom and forgiveness, trauma and wisdom. If 2016’s Curve of the Earth was written from the skies, looking back down, and A Billion Heartbeats rooted itself firmly in the trenches of “the culture wars, and protests, and a very street-level perspective”, then their newest completes the trilogy by casting its gaze “back up from the void, to the cosmic again”. It’s an album with a clear, coherent point of view, comprising nine songs that all form fragments of a thematic whole.
Formed in the early 2000s on Eel Pie Island in London, Mystery Jets have earned a reputation for eccentric songwriting, inventive arrangements, and a distinctive fusion of indie rock, psychedelic pop, and progressive influences. Celebrating 20 years of Making Dens, 10 years of Curve of the Earth, and now a whole new album birth too, Mystery Jets are still going strong because they’ve still got this curiosity and desire to keep pushing themselves forward. They’ve got something to say and, on A Hole To See The Sky Through, they’ve found a new way of saying it.
Tracklist:
A Hole To See The Sky Through I
Black Sage
Doomsday Waltz
God Rays
Flea Joint
Long Lonely Road
Soul River
Anaglypta
A Hole To See The Sky Through II
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