Islands are back with a new album called Ski Mask, it will come out September via frontman Nick Thorburn’s label Manqué. It’s the quick follow-up to last years A Sleep & A Forgetting. They made the announcement to day by releasing the album’s first single “Wave Forms.”
The single sounds like a good mix of everything Islands has released over their career, which is no accident. This is basically what happened with the new album. Thorburn explained in a press release:
This record is really about being angry. For better or worse, this record kind of sums up my experience thus far with being in a band. I feel like we’re kind of at a crossroads and this record is kind of me just declaring forfeiture in some ways. Like the third act of a movie—just after it seems like all hope is lost, that’s when the big breakthrough moment happens. For Islands, this is us waiting for the breakthrough moment.
This record is kind of a culmination of all the different things we’ve done over the years. It’s basically a melting pot of all those sounds. So much of this record is about identity—specifically, the quest for finding out your own identity. … All of these feelings and ideas that have been bubbling up over the course of four previous albums finally came to the surface on this one. This record is like a summation of Islands, everything we’ve ever done distilled into one record. It’s basically an essential introduction to Islands—it’s everything we’ve ever been about.
Listen to “Ski Mask” below.
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