After recording four albums of stargazing folk-rock in and around their native LA with peers casually swinging by their recording spaces, Mapache are announcing a fifth LP titled Swinging Stars today, which was recorded at the storied Panoramic House in Marin County on the outskirts of San Francisco. Scheduled to drop on August 18 via Innovative Leisure, the record hones in on both the rural and the astronomical elements of their sound aided by the remote artist retreat locale, which similarly helped to birth recent records from The War on Drugs and My Morning Jacket. “It’s a pretty impactful place,” the band’s Clay Finch shares, later joking about the sense of isolation: “We were all captive. No one could escape.”
The first single to arrive ahead of the album is called “People Please,” and it introduces the record as an upbeat, driving work of lush folk-rock with the track’s pleading vocals working in tandem with a barroom piano to achieve a distinctly engaging sound. As for its subject matter, the band discloses: “Some people talk your life into a corner in the name of god or religion, but you can talk your life back with whatever vocabulary you feel inside. It’s just about playing how you feel.”
Check out a grainy Gibb-directed visual for the track—which sees the band wandering hazy green pastures—below, and pre-order Swinging Stars here.
