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Nov 15, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by Parri Thomas

William Doyle (formerly known as East India Youth) has announced a new album, Springs Eternal, and shared a new song from it, “Relentless Melt.” Springs Eternal will be released on February 16, 2024 via Tough Love. Check out “Relentless Melt” below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art, as well as Doyle’s upcoming tour dates. Also below is the album’s “Surrender Yourself,” which was shared last month.

Doyle had this to say about “Relentless Melt” in a press release: “The term ‘time’s relentless melt’ struck me as a great phrase within Susan Sontag’s essay ‘On Photography.’ Sontag writes of the ability for a photograph to freeze a moment in someone’s life while also documenting the unrelenting movement of time itself. It was something I was thinking a lot about while making this album. One remedy I’ve found for the feeling that the end of time is hurtling towards us is in the refuge that songs and albums can offer me. Songs are rooms in which one has the ability to have their sense of time pleasurably distorted. There’s a couple of moments in this song where I tried to create a literal interpretation of that very distortion. Can you hear it? It’s coming up over the horizon.”

Springs Eternal is the follow-up to 2021’s Great Spans of Muddy Time. Mike Lindsay of Tunng and LUMP co-produced the album at his MESS studio in Margate and it features contributions from Alexander Painter, Genevieve Dawson, and Brian Eno.

“Most of the songs are in the first-person, but rather than being autobiographical, I was trying to imagine hyperreality versions of myself,” Doyle says. “What if decisions I made in my life had resulted in the self of each particular song? How many degrees of separation am I from those realities? It’s a frightening thought, and frightening thoughts often make for good songs.”

The album was a recurring theme of water and flooding, in part in relation to the global climate crisis. “It wasn’t until we were mixing the record that I realized how many water references there are,” Doyle says. “I guess there’s a fluid border between our inner selves and the outside world that allows things to flood in, in unstoppable or perhaps irresistible ways.”

Check out our The End interview with Doyle from 2020.

Read our 2015 interview with Doyle.

Springs Eternal Tracklist:

1. Garden of the Morning
2. Now In Motion
3. Relentless Melt
4. Soft to the Touch
5. Eternal Spring
6. Cannot Unsee
7. Castawayed
8. Surrender Yourself
9. A Short Illness
10. A Long Life
11. Because of a Dream

William Doyle 2024 UK Tour Dates: Mar 20th – Cambridge, Portland Arms
Mar 21st – Margate, Where Else?
Mar 23rd – Bristol, Ritual Union
Mar 24th – Manchester, Deaf Institute
Mar 27th – Nottingham, Bodega Social
Mar 28th – Edinburgh, Sneaky Pete’s
Mar 29th – Leeds, The Wardrobe
Mar 30th – Kendal, Gan Yam Brewery
Apr 3rd – London, Lafayette

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