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May 22, 2018 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Stephanie Griffin Mutual Benefit

Mutual Benefit (aka Jordan Lee) has announced a new album, Thunder Follows the Heart, and shared two songs from it, “New History” and “Storm Cellar Heart.” Thunder Follows the Heart is due out September 21 via Transgressive. Listen to both songs below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

“New History” features guest vocals from Johanne Swanson (of Yohuna). Lee had this to say about the song in a press release: “I think people in power benefit greatly from a general lack of historic memory in the U.S. I’ve been wondering if the first step to imagining a more just world is to study our history better, not just the linear revisionist one that is oft-repeated but all the unsung champions of equal rights as well as the acts of unthinkable cruelty that humans are also capable of.”

“Storm Cellar Heart” is described in the press release as “an ode to taking shelter and the fraught impulse to hide from the loudness of the outside world.” Says Lee in the press release: “Writing this provided a reminder that while moments of recharging are important, I didn’t want to get too entrenched in escapism instead of the messiness of living.”

Lee was inspired by sitting through a big storm in rural New England, where, as the press release put it, he “found himself becoming transfixed by the time in between the lightning and thunder.”

In Lee’s own words: “The silence thick with inevitability. While I was writing the record, everywhere I looked, I saw massive societal strain on both people and the environment, and began to wonder if this is the lightning before some thunderous change. If we are living in that in-between time.”

The album is the follow-up to 2013’s Love’s Crushing Diamond and 2016’s Skip a Sinking Stone.

Thunder Follows the Light Tracklist:

1. Written In Lightning
2. New History
3. Storm Cellar Heart
4. Shedding Skin
5. Come to Pass
6. Waves, Breaking
7. No Dominion
8. Mountains Shadow
9. Nightingale Sing
10. Thunder Follows

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