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Aug 10, 2015 Joanna Newsom By Michael Wojtas

After five long years of silence, singer/songwriter Joanna Newsom is back with “Sapokanikan.” The single is being released in support of Newson’s newly announced fourth album, Divers, which is set for an October 23 release on Drag City. Divers, the follow up to 2010’s acclaimed Have One on Me , features arrangements from Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi, and Dave Longstreth, and was recorded by Steve Albini and Noah Georgeson. Below, you can check out the album art and track listing, as well as a rather lovely clip for “Sapokanikan” from filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) , who directed Newsom in last year’s Inherent Vice.

A press release describes the album as such: “The music of Divers is a wonder of considered arrangements, immaculately sequenced for telescoped brevity. The music speeds with dissociative dread over montaged cityscapes; it hoofs with delight among the collaged quotations and sepia-toned codices of Popular Song; it ambles its carefree citational course through the public domain and down into the dustier corners of municipal parks, to lionize infamous airmen and anonymous Dutch Masters, to mourn pearl divers and Poorwills, and to elegize the ineluctable tragedy of relativity…. At the center of the mythos and the maelstrom is the woman. Divers reminds us that Newsom is a melodist, above all-an acolyte of melody and beauty in form, a crackerjack of emotional truth conveyed with undiluted immediacy.”

Check out the “Sapokanikan” video below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art. Also read our 2010 cover story on Newsom and Have One on Me.

Divers Track Listing:

01. Anecdotes
02. Sapokanikan
03. Leaving the City
04. Goose Eggs
05. Waltz of the 101st Lightborne
06. The Things I Say
07. Divers
08. Same Old Man
09. You Will Not Take My Heart Alive
10. A Pin-Light Bent
11. Time, As A Symptom

Album Art: