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Jun 13, 2023 By Kat Ramkumar Photography by Danny Clinch

ANTI- has announced Bird Machine, a previously unreleased posthumous album by Sparklehorse, the project of the late Mark Linkous, and shared its first single, “Evening Star Supercharger,” via a lyric video. Bird Machine is due out September 8. The lyric video features handwritten lyrics by Mark Linkous. Watch it below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork.

After Linkous tragically took his own life in 2010, his brother Matt and his sister-in-law Melisaa, who had both worked with Sparklehorse, sifted through boxes of tapes to catalog and preserve Linkous’ unreleased recordings and eventually brought Bird Machine to life.

Linkous started working on Bird Machine in 2009 and had talked through plans for the record with Matt, but unfortunately, he died before it could come to fruition. Now, his family and Bryan Hoffa, an audio preservation specialist at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, listened to and archived Linkous’ recordings, most of which were close to completion. “It was as though the songs let you know,” says Melissa in a press release. “Mark communicated these songs. We just did our best to transmit them.”

This process was a little contentious, as Linkous was known for being a perfectionist about his work, and the question of completing the album weighed heavily on Matt. “It’s the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” says Matt. “It’s difficult making a choice about someone else’s art, even if you’ve known them all your life and worked with them, even if they were your brother and best friend. We had long conversations about not wanting to take this into a different direction. We wanted to bring out what was there.”

Bird Machine was produced with the help of Alan Weatherhead, mixed by Joel Hamilton, and mastered by Greg Calbi, who previously had close ties with Sparklehorse.

“It means so much to me, this last batch of beautiful staff that my brother was putting together,” says Matt. “When I sit down and put on a pair of headphones, I’ll run it all the way through. Everything from ‘It Will Never Stop’ to ‘Evening Star Supercharger’ to ‘Stay,’ that’s just Mark letting it out.”

This isn’t the first of Linkous’ unreleased work to be brought to light. In 2022, Matt shared a previously unreleased Sparklehorse song, “It Will Never Stop,” which is the opening track to Bird Machine.

Read our 2006 interview with Sparklehorses’ Mark Linkous about his fourth studio album Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain.

Bird Machine Tracklist:

1. It Will Never Stop
2. Kind Ghosts
3. Evening Star Supercharger
4. O Child
5. Falling Down
6. I Fucked It Up
7. Hello Lord
8. Daddy’s Gone
9. Chaos of the Universe
10. Listening to the Hisgons
11. Everybody’s Gone to Sleep
12. Scull of Lucia
13. Blue
14. Stay

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