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Apr 14, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Peter Toggeth and Mikel Cee Karlsson

José González has announced his first new album in over six years, Local Valley, and shared a new song from it, “Visions.” Local Valley is due out September 17 via Mute and includes “El Invento,” a new Spanish language song González shared in February. The Swedish singer/songwriter/guitarist’s last studio album was 2015’s Vestiges & Claws. The delicate “Visions” is backed by bird songs and can be listened to below. Also below are the album’s tracklist and cover art.

“We are the apes that are starting to understand the universe and our place in it,” says González of “Visions” in a press release. “We are changing our surroundings in an exceedingly rapid pace, so much that we’re becoming stewards of our planet whether we like it or not. As Stewart Brand said, ‘We are as gods and we have to get good at it.’ The lyrics came to me in early February 2020 just as there were more and more tweets about the possible pandemic. The topic of the song felt very timely. You can hear the birds and ambient sounds from the veranda, along with a layer of synth loops in the background.”

Local Valley was recorded at Studio Koltrast Hakefjorden, a studio set up by González in his family’s summer house, north of Gothenburg.

In the press release the musician says the album “is similar to my other solo albums in sound and spirit, a natural continuation of the styles I’ve been adding through the years both solo and with Junip. I set out to write songs in the same vein as my old ones: short, melodic and rhythmical, a mixture of classic folk singer songwriting and songs with influences from Latin America and Africa. It’s more outward looking than my earlier works, but no less personal. On the contrary, I feel more comfortable than ever saying that this album reflects me and my thoughts right now.”

Of the themes on the album, González adds: “Many of these songs have a crystal-clear, secular humanist agenda: anti-dogma, pro-reason. There’s no political agenda, though, at least not in a classical left-right spectrum. Maybe in a globalist-secular vs. theocratic-nationalist way: the focus is on underlying worldviews, and on our existential questions as smart apes on a quest to understand ourselves and our place in the cosmos.”

Local Valley Tracklist:

01 El Invento
02 Visions
03 The Void
04 Horizons
05 Head On
06 Valle Local
07 Lasso ln
08 Lilla G
09 Swing
10 Tjomme
11 Line of Fire
12 En Stund Pa Jorden
13 Honey Honey

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