Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter announce new album

Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter have announced details of their first album since the 2011 release, Marble Son.

Forever, I’ve Been Being Born is the band’s fifth album since 2002, and is set for release on November 28 via Ideologic Organ in Europe, the United Kingdom, Asia and South America and Southern Lord in North America and Australasia.

Today, the band shares lead single, Gentle Chaperone, featuring Marissa Nadler, which you can watch / listen to below.

The album also features longtime collaborator and guitarist, Phil Wandscher, who joined Sykes on last year’s U.K. / European tour supporting Sunn O))). Speaking about Forever, I’ve Been Being Born, Sykes offers comment:

“This album is our attempt to create elegant folk and sometimes ragged, cosmic, heart rendered songs full of eulogies and laments. Our sound is still familiar enough, but unrecognisable at times – we’ve gotten older and wearier, the music more fragile…

“…When we started recording this album,  I remember saying, ‘Play the songs as if the edge of a butterfly wing was brushing against your cheek in the dark while you’re holding a small child.’ I wanted to connote tenderness and a state of grace in the wake of resolution – paying homage to the creeping knowledge of an emerging, menacing undertone forming in our collective psyche. In hindsight, the delay in releasing this record has been a bit of a blessing, as the lyrics seem more poignant now, transcending our own internal voices and psyches. As the world shares its collective crisis, so we too, share our songs.”

Recording a new album was delayed for years, in the wake of two band members unexpectedly leaving after Marble Son. “Losing our rhythm section was heartbreaking,” Sykes says. “It sounds cliche, but we had to grieve that loss, and in doing so, we had to separate ourselves from making music for a while, because dare I say, music was painful at the time. It reminded us of what we’d lost. Bands are like family and I’d lost my family. So yes, I had to give up music in order to fall in love with music again.”