Fleet Foxes Release New Album Shore: Listen – Pitchfork

As teased and promised, Fleet Foxes have released their fourth album, Shore. The release of the record, which follows 2017’s Crack-Up, coincides with today’s autumnal equinox. Below, watch Kersti Jan Werdal’s Shore film and find lyric videos for each song on the album.

Shore is being released by ANTI-. A physical edition of the album is slated to arrive February 5.

Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold began working on Shore in September 2018, finishing the album earlier this month. He recorded Shore in Manhattan, Long Island City, Paris, Los Angeles, and at the National’s Long Pond Studio in Hudson.

Contributors to Shore include Uwade Akhere (who sings on the opening “Wading in Waist-High Water”), drummers Chris Bear and Homer Steinweiss, composer and artist Meara O’Reilly, Brazilian singer Tim Bernardes, Hamilton Leithauser and his family, Daniel Rossen, Kevin Morby, violist/violinist Marta Sofia Honer, guitarist Michael Bloch, and recording and production engineer Beatriz Artola. There is also a sample of Brian Wilson on Shore’s “Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman.”

In a lengthy statement about the new album, Pecknold explained that he was heavily inspired by Arthur Russell, Nina Simone, João Gilberto, Sam Cooke, and more. He stated:

I wanted to make an album that celebrated life in the face of
death, honoring our lost musical heroes explicitly in the lyrics and
carrying them with me musically, committing to living fully and
vibrantly in a way they no longer can, in a way they maybe couldn’t
even when they were with us, despite the joy they brought to so many.
I wanted to make an album that felt like a relief, like your toes
finally touching sand after being caught in a rip current. I wanted
the album to exist in a liminal space outside of time, inhabiting
both the future and the past, accessing something spiritual or
personal that is untouchable by whatever the state of the world may be
at a given moment, whatever our season. I see “shore” as a place of
safety on the edge of something uncertain, staring at Whitman’s waves
reciting “death,” tempted by the adventure of the unknown at the
same time you are relishing the comfort of the stable ground beneath
you. This was the mindset I found, the fuel I found, for making this
album.

Elsewhere in the statement, Pecknold wrote that, next year, the band will release nine more songs, “co-written from the ground up with [Fleet Foxes members] Morgan Henderson, Skyler Skjelset, Casey Wescott, and Christian Wargo.” Read the rest of Pecknold’s artist statement here.

Fleet Foxes released Crack-Up six years after their second record Helplessness Blues. Revisit Pitchfork’s 2017 interview “Life and Death on Manhattan Island: Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold Returns.”

Shore:

01 Wading in Waist-High Water
02 Sunblind
03 Can I Believe You
04 Jara
05 Featherweight
06 A Long Way Past the Past
07 For a Week or Two
08 Maestranza
09 Young Man’s Game
10 I’m Not My Season
11 Quiet Air / Gioia
12 Going-to-the-Sun Road
13 Thymia
14 Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman
15 Shore