It’s been six year since Julie Byrne last released an album, though the new-agey songwriter has occasionally surfaced on new material from her peers, including guest vocals on Vagabon’s last album and a LEYA mixtape, not to mention a couple singles released in collaboration with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Hundred Waters’ Trayer Tryon. But today she’s officially announced her return with her third album The Greater Wings slated for release on July 7 via Ghostly International. According to Byrne, the LP will be a “love letter to my chosen family and an expression of the depth of my commitment to our shared future.”
She continues, “Being reshaped by grief also has me more aware of what death does not take from me. I commit that to heart, to words, to sound. Music is not bound to any kind of linear time, so in the capacity to record and speak to the future: this is what it felt like to me, when we were simultaneous, alive, occurring all at once. What it has felt like to go up against my edge and push, the love that has made it worth all this fight. These memories are my values, they belong with me.”
Arriving ahead of the release is the album’s first single, “Summer Glass,” which sets Byrne’s characteristically baroque vocals over a harp-laced ambient electronic soundscape as she meditates on chosen family. Check out the grainy, nostalgic video for the track below.
