Big Thief will release their new album — which boasts a mystical mouthful of a title, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You — Feb. 11 via 4AD.
The announcement arrives alongside another single, “Time Escaping,” which joins four previously released tracks now attached to the LP. The album, available for preorder, follows 2019’s Two Hands.
“One of the things that bonds us together as a band is pure magic,” Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker said in a statement. “I think we all have the same guide and none of us have ever spoken what it is because we couldn’t name it, but somehow, we are all going for the same thing, and when we hit it… we all know it’s it, but none of us to this day, or maybe ever, will be able to articulate in words what the ‘it’ is. Something about it is magic to me.”
The 20 tracks that make up Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You originated over a series of sessions set apart by location, style of recording, mood and commitment to creating a record steeped in the notion of chosen family, individual growth and artistic change.
The recording process began with an 8-track tape machine at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings where “Certainty” and “Sparrow” came to be. Later, Big Thief unraveled the LP’s sonic landscape at a session in Topanga Canyon, California that yielded “Little Things” before unearthing “Change” in the Colorado Rockies. By the end of the band’s atmospheric fourth session, held in Scott McMicken’s Tucson, Arizona home studio, the project had come to a natural conclusion.
“Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon,” Max Oleartchik explained on a phone call to his mother, recounting the feeling of reuniting with his bandmates. “And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.”
Big Thief previously announced a massive world tour for 2022. The group’s North American leg will kick off April 12 in Ithaca, New York and wrap May 15 in Pioneertown, California.
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You Tracklist
1. “Change”
2. “Time Escaping”
3. “Spud Infinity”
4. “Certainty”
5. “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You”
6. “Sparrow”
7. “Little Things”
8. “Heavy Bend”
9. “Flower of Blood”
10. “Blurred View”
11. “Red Moon”
12. “Dried Roses”
13. “No Reason”
14.” Wake Me up to Drive”
15. “Promise Is a Pendulum”
16. “12,000 Lines”
17. “Simulation Swarm”
18. “Love Love Love”
19. “The Only Place”
20. “Blue Lightning”