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Jul 01, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Alex Marks

New Zealand’s Connan Mockasin has announced a new album made in collaboration with his near 72-year-old father, Ade, entitled It’s Just Wind, and shared its first single, “The Wolf,” which is inspired by the fairytale character the Big Bad Wolf. A psychic told Connan to make the album and it was recorded in the aftermath of Ade flatlining for 40 minutes after a cardiac arrest. It’s Just Wind is due out July 14 (which is Ade’s 72nd birthday) via Mexican Summer. Check out the video for “The Wolf” below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

A psychic told Connan that a project with his father had to be “made a priority, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.” After Ade’s near-death experience the duo went from Te Awanga, New Zealand to Mexican Summer’s Marfa Myths festival in Marfa, Texas to record the album, armed with Ade’s notebook of song ideas and various other musicians—John Carroll Kirby, Matthew Eccles, Nicholas Harsant, and Rory McCarthy (aka Infinite Bisous). The band improvised somewhat in the studio, with Ade reciting his lyrics over the jams. Ade says he “had a lot of nasty drugs pumped through me, my doctor at the time said it’d cooked the brain a bit,” so he was a bit out of it at the time. The album was mainly recorded in one day.

A press release compares It’s Just Wind to a couple of classics: “There’s a quality of bittersweet self-reflection redolent of Bowie’s Blackstar or Cash’s American IV as an old man, from a point of slight detachment, surveys his life like a landscape.”

Connan Mockasin’s last album was 2018’s Jassbusters, which has an accompanying film, Bostyn ’n Dobsyn. That album was the follow-up to 2013’s Caramel, although in 2013 Mockasin teamed up with England’s Sam Dust (who records as LA Priest and is the former frontman of Late of the Pier) to form Soft Hair.

It’s Just Wind Tracklist:

1. The Wolf
2. Te Awanga
3. What it Are
4. Edge of Darkness
5. Tight Waxing
6. It’s Just Wind
7. Marfa
8. Round Peg in a Square Hole
9. Stuck
10. Clifton

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