It’s only been a year since My Morning Jacket has put out an album, but it’s been six years since they’ve recorded one. The Waterfall II arrived over last summer and was received as an un-Godfather-II-like sequel to The Waterfall, written and recorded in the same period in which that 2015 release was. But this morning, Jim James and his band have announced they’ll be returning to their regularly scheduled programming with a brand new, self-titled record, along with the first single “Regularly Scheduled Programming.”
Rather than being a metacommentary on their career path, though, the new single and its video address the ubiquity of screen time—a once-urban concept that’s now bled into the rurality of MMJ’s alt-country sound. “This song really hits home for me after what we’ve gone through with the pandemic,” James shared in a press statement. “But even before then, it felt like so many of us were trading real life for social media, trading our own stories for the storylines on TV, trading our consciousness for drugs. We need to help each other wake up to real love before it’s too late.”
Watch the video for the track below, and expect My Morning Jacket out October 22 on ATO Records.
