• News

• All

Feb 19, 2021 By Mark Redfern

Lael Neale has released a new album, Acquainted With Night, today via Sub Pop. To honor that she has shared an eerie self-directed video for its title track, “Acquainted With Night.” Also, now that the album is out you can stream the whole thing. Check out the video and album below.

In a press release Neale has this to say about the video: “‘Acquainted With Night’ is another homemade video that explores my complex relationship with technology. I am drawn to archaic machines, but that doesn’t mean I want to slip backwards into some idealized past. I’m more interested in stepping out of time entirely.”

Neale’s new album is the product of a long and arduous process in which she worked with many different producers. She states in a press release: “Every time I reached the end of recording, I felt the songs had been stripped of their vitality in the process of layering drums, bass, guitar, violin, and organ over them. They felt weighed down.”

Her artistic breakthrough occurred when she discovered the Omnichord, which she began to use frequently in creating her songs, and was assisted by Guy Blakeslee of the band Entrance in the recording process, where the songs were recorded onto tape. Blakeslee states in a press release: “An idea that was floating around in our conversations before and during the process was ‘lost tapes’—and I think these recordings feel like such an artifact—a sonic portrait of a season of a life, a sacred tape made in private by an artist at the peak of creative power and rediscovered by chance for the ages.”

Though she is from rural Virginia, Neale has been living in Los Angeles for over a decade now, but in April 2020 returned to her family farm in VA because of the pandemic.

Acquainted With Night includes “For No One For Now,” a new single that was shared in November and made it to #1 on our Songs of the Week list. When the album was announced in January she shared another single from it, “Blue Vein,” which also made our Songs of the Week list. The album’s first single, “Every Star Shivers in the Dark,” was released in October on Sub Pop.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.