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Sep 17, 2025 By Mark Redfern Photography by Elizabeth Weinberg

Flock of Dimes (the solo project of Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner) is releasing a new album, The Life You Save, on October 10 via Sub Pop. Now she has shared its third single, “Defeat.” Watch the lyric video below.

Wasner had this to say about the song in a press release: “This song represents a moment of total surrender. It’s about the moment I finally allowed myself to accept my own powerlessness, and started the process of learning how to step back and allow others to face the consequences of their actions. It features a moment of melodic counterpoint that became a sort of mantra for myself as I attempted to make my way through this process—I’m inside it, after all. This realization—kindly first introduced to me by someone I love who sees me clearly—was something of a breakthrough for me. Learning to see myself as a part of a dynamic (rather than separate, having escaped) was an important step in changing my own behavior—which is, ultimately, the only real agent of change over which I have any sort of control. Three years after I wrote it, the work continues—I am still working on trying to see myself not as some kind of savior figure, but just another flawed human being, doing her best.”

Previously Flock of Dimes shared the album’s first single, “Long After Midnight,” via a music video. It was one of our Songs of the Week. Then she shared its second single, “Afraid,” via a music video. It was also one of our Songs of the Week.

The Life You Save is the third Flock of Dimes album and follows her 2021 album, Head of Roses (and its 2022 companion collection, Head of Roses: Phantom Limb). Head of Roses was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2021. Wasner produced the new album, with additional production from Nick Sanborn. She recorded it at Betty’s in Chapel Hill, NC and Montrose Recording in Los Angeles, CA.

Wasner previously issued this lengthy statement on the new album: “My previous records, generally, have been a summary of things I had already been through—experiences I had observed and reflected upon, reporting back from some amount of distance. But this record is different. It is an attempt to report from inside of a process that is ongoing and unfinished, from which I will likely never fully emerge as long as I am alive: my struggle within the cycles of addiction and co-dependency.

“I set out trying to make a record about other people.

“Their problems, their struggles, their addictions.

“I struggled for many years to give myself permission to write about this subject—worried that I was telling someone else’s story, a story that was not mine to tell. The work felt hazy and obscured; I was confused, and I struggled. The beauty of songwriting, at its best, is that it puts you in touch with your subconscious—a place where you can only tell the truth. Many of those truths were hard to accept. Some I don’t, even now, feel fully ready to say. But through this process, I came to understand that I was struggling with this record because I wasn’t being honest with myself. I was so deeply entrenched in the system in which I was raised that I thought I was outside of it, and the ways in which I continued to participate remained invisible to me.

“But slowly, painstakingly, through this work I began to realize—I am not apart from all of this. I have been performing my role from a distance, but I am still engaged, still connected:

“I’m inside it, after all.

“As it turns out, this record is not someone else’s story–it is mine, the story of my life. A life spent believing I had escaped, and that I deserved to feel guilty for doing so. A life in which I believed that the right combination of words, actions, effort, and expense could somehow change others’ behavior. And a life in which blindness to my own patterns caused me to hurt others, and prevented me from finding the true love and acceptance I yearned for.

“The belief that you can rescue others comes from more than one place, internally speaking. The part that is easiest to see and acknowledge is the one that stems from love, good intentions, and a genuine desire to offer care and support. But there’s an uglier side, and that part is harder to look at—the ego, the pridefulness, the belief that you are better, stronger, somehow more deserving than all the rest. That through your attempts to control others’ behavior, you can somehow secure a sense of safety for yourself.

“I know the rules, but I ignore them,

I think I’m good enough to pull this off.

“Or, more simply:

“I think I’m god; I know I’m not.

“For me, that was the puzzle piece that finally made it all make sense. But it was also the piece that was the hardest to hold. It took a long time for me to build up enough love—not for others, but for myself—that acknowledging this truth would not break me. I understand now that I’m not the savior, not the hero, not the chosen one. I’m spinning in my own wheel, a bundle of addictions and adaptations and blind spots, just like everybody else. And there is a beauty to that, along with a kind of freedom.

“In the end, it is my hope that this record exists as a testament to the depth of my love for those I cannot save, and that it might provide some comfort for anyone who is still learning how to love and live for themselves.”

Read our review of Head of Roses here.

Read our The End interview with Wasner about endings and death here.

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