Since laying his Microphones project to rest two years ago, Phil Elverum has been intermittently dropping info about a new Mount Eerie album and sharing in-progress works and alternative mixes to subscribers over on Substack. Now that album has a name: Night Palace. 

Landing on 1 November through Elverum’s own label, the first Mount Eerie album in 5 years is said to occupy a similarly fuzzy and thoroughly analog space to the Microphones’ 2001 cult classic the Glow pt. 2. 

Like that album, Night Palace is a long one, with a generous 80 minutes of music over 26 songs. Written and recorded in his analog reel-to-reel home studio over the past two years, Elverum’s new work offers something of a spiritual reset. After several years of turbulence in his personal life, he’s found his way back to a softer place, full of airy, unhurried wonder. That doesn’t mean that Night Palace is completely devoid of sharp edges, though. The press release confirms that distorted feedback and “the hard world” are still part of Elverum’s toolbox, with “songs of decolonization and backwoods protest.”

Describing the album, Elverum writes:

"For me, the couple years it took to make Night Palace was a slow drip, a patient drift on some deeper currents. Its many songs are about a moment of release, of clarity found in a non-intellectual lightning strike after long waves of turmoil and surrender, about being slapped in the face by dawn. That sounds vague. They are about responding verbally to wild animals, about saying fuck you to the neighbor’s private property signs, about decolonization, about decomposition, about truly immersing in an ambiguous ocean. Some Zen, some [Howard] Zinn."

The songs may be rooted in the autobiographical, but Elverum says the intention was to reach for "something more spacious" than his own circumstances, adding:

"These songs point at a moment of release, of peace found in a non-intellectual lightning strike after long waves of turmoil and surrender. I tried to give them all they needed to go out beyond my little story independently. I have traveled through decades of fluctuations, swinging between the concrete and the mystical, between attachment and annihilation, between certainty and dust, now washed up on a shore in what I’m pretty sure is an authentic state of peace. The desperate reaches toward belief and the recoils of aversion have calmed. A raven loudly flaps through the branches above me and I say hello like it’s no big thing."

News of the album comes with the sharing of the new songs, “Broom of Wind” and “I Walk” – two sonically different entry points into Night Palace’s “many rooms, all welcoming, all varied.” Watch the Indigo Free-directed video for “Broom of Wind” and listen to “I Walk” below:

Looking at the Night Palace tracklist, long-time Elverum fans will no doubt spot that “the Gleam pt. 3” appears to be a successor to songs that feature on the Glow pt. 2 and its predecessor It Was Hot So We Stayed in the Water. The album bio also reveals that the track "Swallowed Alive" features "screaming and lyrics" by Elverum's daughter Agathe and that "Blurred World" contains a snippet of his late wife Geneviève Castrée humming, recorded ten years before she died in 2016 of pancreatic cancer, aged 35.

Night Palace tracklist:

1. Night Palace
2. Huge Fire
3. Breaths
4. Swallowed Alive
5. My Canopy
6. Broom of Wind
7. I Walk
8. (soft air)
9. Empty Paper Towel Roll
10. Wind & Fog
11. Wind & Fog pt. 2
12. Blurred World
13. I Heard Whales (I Think)
14. I Saw Another Bird
15. I Spoke with a Fish
16. Myths Come True
17. Non-Metaphorical Decolonization
18. November Rain
19. Co-Owner of Trees
20. Myths Come True pt. 2
21. & Sun
22. Writing Poems
23. the Gleam pt. 3
24. Stone Woman Gives Birth to a Child at Night
25. Demolition
26. I Need New Eyes

Alongside the album announcement, Elverum has also revealed plans for two US shows taking place in November, with tickets on sale from Friday.

11/19 Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw
11/21 Los Angeles, CA @ The Bellwether

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