SHEARWATER - The New World

There's the world inside us, the projection onto reality of our anxieties and our hopes. And then there's the world outside us, the collision with the sheer, plain otherness of things. "If there's one thing I'd like to do in my life", says Shearwater leader Jonathan Meiburg, "it's to make the world in my mind reflect the real world as closely as possible".
"The New World", the American band's new album, is about exactly that: the tension between our own selves and everything around us. Like the shores of the New World seen for the first time by men from the Old, like our advance into the interregnum of a dark future, as the world we once knew is dying. "The New World" is the logbook of this crossing, and it immediately reveals itself as one of the most precious chapters in Shearwater's entire discography.

"Nothing is ordinary", announces "Daydream Unbeliever" over the steady march of piano. Wonder and fear, the two opposite poles of the gaze. There's a sense of menace in the drum's tolling, in the emphasis of the strings. The spirit of "Palo Santo" and "Rook" vibrates again with a deeper balance: the fruit of maturity, certainly, but also of a few decisive collaborations. First and foremost the one with Shahzad Ismaily (alongside Marc Ribot in Ceramic Dog), since the songs on "The New World" – initially recorded in the familiar surroundings of Dripping Springs, Texas – truly took shape in Ismaily's studio in Brooklyn: "A wonderful place to explore paths you'd never have considered", Meiburg recalls, "a place that completely changes your perception of what's possible".
And then there's Leo Abrahams, a student of none other than the master Brian Eno: it's his London studio where, in the end, the songs were shaped into an organic whole. The coordinates remain the familiar ones: from the most ethereal Talk Talk ("More And More", with its layering and its sax flourishes) to late-period Radiohead ("A Mink In The Dusk", nervy rhythms and choral openings). But while "The Great Awakening" was the album of rebirth (after shelving the unconvincing stint on Sub Pop, now self-financed through crowdfunding), "The New World" is the album of sublimation, in which everything seems to rediscover its own essence.

Tasmanian ravens, Berlin blackbirds, coyotes caught by surprise on the hills of Los Angeles: Meiburg's field recordings are the language of reality telling its own story. They weave through the sinuous flow of "Slugs In The Marigolds" and the climax of "The Only Sound I'm Afraid Of", which crashes against a cliff face of guitars. Along the way, Shearwater (now a stable trio, with Dan Duszynski and Emily Lee alongside Meiburg) meet unexpected fellow travelers, like the group of Malian musicians who appear on "Even Song". The most surprising presence of all, though, is Laurie Anderson, entrusted with the spoken word on the closing "You And Your Dog": struck by Meiburg's first book, "A Most Remarkable Creature" (a second, devoted to Antarctica, is now on the way), she agreed to lend her voice to a story that unfolds slowly around the repetition of a simple piano phrase.
Along the beach the sea seems to have vanished, as if before a tsunami. The white sky, the metallic horizon. There's a couple with a dog. Laurie Anderson's almost detached delivery seems to describe a dream, or perhaps a memory blurred with time. "It's nice to imagine a version of you and me/ That's still walking around out there/ Where the beach ends and the sky begins". The sound of the clarinet evaporates into the air, like a warning not to forget that the present is all we have: "I wish I'd paid more attention/ I thought those days were going to go on/ Forever".

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07/08/2026