Grouper announces new record, Shade, out on October 22nd via Kranky

Shade, the twelfth full-length by Pacific Northwest artist Liz Harris, also known as Grouper, is a collection of songs spanning 15 years. She characterises Shade as a record about respite and the coast, poetically and literally. How we frame ourselves in a landscape, how in turn it frames ourselves – memories and experiences carried forward mapping our connection to place. On this new record, songs touch on loss, flaws, hiding places, love, deeply connected to the Bay Area and the North Coast, with its unique moods of solitude, beauty, and isolation – a place described and transformed by the chaos and power of river-mouth, wild maritime storms, columns of mist that rise up unexpectedly on the road at night. Portions of Shade were recorded on Mount Tamalpais during a self-made residency years back, other pieces were made longer ago in Portland, while the rest were tracked during more recent sessions in Astoria. Throughout, Harris threads a hidden radiant language of voice, disquiet, and guitar, framed by open space and the sense of being far away. Below this article, you can listen to the “Unclean Mind”, the first song of this unique collection to be unveiled.

Shade will be released on October 22nd via Kranky. Digital and physical pre-orders are now available here.

Photo credit: Gordon Ashworth