For the follow-up to their last record, 2011’s Tamer Animals, Other Lives made a migration—uprooting from their hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Portland, Oregon—and proceeded to pen nearly sixty songs for the new effort. Whereas Tamer Animals was about home, songwriter and lead vocalist Jesse Tabish cites isolation and travel as hallmarks of the forthcoming Rituals. “There was a spirit of change,” he says. “For the first times in our lives, we were moving off on our own away from our families and kind of coming into our own. I wanted the songs to reflect that new spirit.”
The first track from the record, “Reconfiguration,” (which premiered today over at NPR) is an immediate and welcome return to the band’s familiar, warm and winsome atmospheric melodies. Striking and full of dynamic spirit with the combination of Tabish’s stirring, abstracted vocals, and the myriad multi-instrumentalism of Jonothan Mooney and Josh Onstott, the song is a promising first listen of an instant highly anticipated forthcoming album.
Rituals is produced by Mooney, Tabish, and Joey Waronker, and will be released May 5 via TBD Records.
