New Music From the innocence mission

Posted on Oct 24, 2024
New Music From the innocence mission

The first studio album from the innocence mission in four years, Midwinter Swimmers (due November 29, 2024) sounds immediately like an old friend. At the same time, it’s a new kind of adventure for the beloved Pennsylvania band of high school friends Karen Peris, Don Peris, and Mike Bitts, having both an expansive, cinematic quality and the strange, lo-fi beauty of a newly discovered vintage folk/pop album, brimming with melody.

Lead single and album-opening song ‘This Thread Is a Green Street” is a perfect entrance into the innocence mission’s sound and sensibility. Karen Peris describes it as “a sort of envisioning the landscape as a world of doorways, that might allow us to locate memory or to be nearer in some way to people we miss. And the transportive quality of scenes we might come upon in the natural world, or even in everyday objects- a sewing thread when I’m mending something could remind me of a street map. One of the things about recording it was, how to find this feeling inside the sound, and how to find the half-remembered beauty of sing-alongs of our 1970s childhoods. There’s a search in recording that goes on being elusive, in a good way.” Piano melodies and high electric with strummed nylon string guitars make a glimmery soundtrack for title track and follow-up single “Midwinter Swimmers,” a happy-sad song of hopefulness about seeing an absent loved one soon. It takes place during an instant when swimmers seen at a distance through tears are refracted and appear as something beautiful and moving. Something of this feeling is echoed in the recording, made with a spontaneity and a sense of trying to capture a single moment and hold it up to the light.

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Label: Thérèse Records / Bella Union

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