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Oct 25, 2021 By Joey Arnone Photography by Barbara FG

Midlake have announced the release of their first new studio album in over eight years, For the Sake of Bethel Woods. It will be out on March 18, 2022 via ATO. The band has also shared a lyric video for a new song titled “Meanwhile…,” the first song release from the album. Check it out below, along with the album’s tracklist and cover art.

“‘Meanwhile…’ is a song referencing the time in between what transpired leading up to our hiatus in ’14, and what inspired us to reconvene in ’20,” states frontman Eric Pulido in a press release. “The former being an unhealthy and unsustainable place that called for pause and the latter a serendipitous visit from Jesse’s late father [Dave Chandler, depicted on the album cover] in a dream encouraging him to reunite with the band. Everyone had their respective experience during the uncertain time apart culminating in a confident and celebratory return to form.”

For the Sake of Bethel Woods was produced, engineered, and mixed by John Congleton (St. Vincent, Explosions in the Sky, Sharon Van Etten). The album’s cover art features a reproduction of an image of keyboardist Jesse Chandler’s father designed by visual artist Brian Lotti.

Chandler states: “At age 16, my father and his friend hitchhiked from Ridgewood, NJ to the Woodstock festival in 1969. This image of him with his hand to his face appears in the 1970 Woodstock documentary, as the camera pans across the crowd during John Sebastian’s set. My father actually ended up moving to Woodstock, NY—where I grew up—in 1981. For me, the picture of that kid, my dad, forever frozen in time, encapsulates what it means to be in the throes of impressionable and fleeting youth, and all that the magic of music, peace, love, and communion bring to it, whether one knows it at the time or not. (I think he knew it).”

The band’s last album, Antiphon, came out in 2013 via ATO.

For the Sake of Bethel Woods Tracklist:

1. Commune
2. Bethel Woods
3. Glistening
4. Exile
5. Feast of Carrion
6. Noble
7. Gone
8. Meanwhile…
9. Dawning
10. The End
11. Of Desire

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