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Mar 22, 2022 By Joey Arnone Photography by Bryan Parker

Shearwater have announced the release of a new album, The Great Awakening, which will be out on June 10 via the band’s Polyborus label in partnership with Secretly Distribution. The band has also shared a video for the album’s lead single, “Xenarthran.” View the Emily Cross-directed video below.

In a press release, the band’s Jonathan Meiburg elaborates on the new song: “Xenarthrans are the ‘strange-jointed’ mammals, which mostly live in South America: armadillos, anteaters, and sloths. Only one species of armadillo has wandered up to the southern U.S., and while we were recording The Great Awakening in Texas, I often saw them scurrying dimly through fields at dusk or snuffling in the mud after a rainstorm, and I couldn’t help admiring them. They’d walked thousands of miles on their wispy little feet, long noses to the ground, trundling into alien landscapes filled with unfamiliar dangers.”

“This song, and Emily’s eerie video, aren’t about armadillos, exactly—but they are about making your way through the dark spaces of a menacing but still very beautiful world. The roaring sounds near the end are howler monkeys I recorded in Guyana.”

Shearwater’s most recent album, Jet Plane and Oxbow, came out in 2016 via Sub Pop.

The Great Awakening Tracklist:

1. Highgate
2. No Reason
3. Xenarthran
4. Laguna Seca
5. Everyone You Touch
6. Empty Orchestra
7. Milkweed
8. Detritivore
9. Aqaba
10. There Goes The Sun
11. Wind Is Love

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