It seems a long time since we’ve heard from Mercury Rev, and indeed their last album Snowflake Midnight was released in 2008! Some good news then in the form of a new album ‘The Light in You’ which will be released in September and a date in the Button Factory in November.

Maybe it’s just that we haven’t heard from them in a while, but this single sounds damn good to me! Tickets for the date in the Button Factory went on sale today.

Mercury Rev – The Light In You is released on 18 September 2015 on Bella Union

LIVE – Button Factory, Dublin – Sunday, 22 November 2015

Bella Union are excited to announce the long-awaited return of US alt-rock legends Mercury Rev whose new album The Light In You will be released 18th September via the label. The band have just unveiled a track from the LP entitled ‘The Queen Of Swans’, and announced an extensive European tour.

As Mercury Rev began recording their eighth studio album in autumn 2013, when asked what people could expect, co-pilot Grasshopper responded, “Steel Resonator Mandolin. Timpani. Sleigh Bells. All sorts of electric guitars…..” He subsequently added, “It is the best stuff we have done in a long, long time. Gonna be big sounding!”

Two years on, The Light In You more than lives up to its billing. The record is filled with wondrous and voluminous kaleidoscopic detail, but also intimate moments of calm, and altogether stands up to the very best that this notable band of maverick explorers has ever created. Its ecstatic highs and shivery comedowns also reflect a particularly turbulent era in the lives of Grasshopper and fellow co-founder Jonathan Donahue, of calamities both personal and physical, but also rebirths and real births (Grasshopper became a father for the first time in 2014). There’s a reason for the seven-year gap since the band’s last album, Snowflake Midnight.

“It was one of those otherworldly life sequences, when everything you think is solid turns molten,” explains Jonathan. “But also, when something is worth saying, it can take a long time to say it, rather than just blurt it out.”

As well as The Light In You being the first Mercury Rev album with Bella Union, it’s also the first with only Jonathan and Grasshopper at the controls, as scheduling conflicts and travel between the Catskills and Dave Fridmann’s Tarbox studio became too great to overcome. On The Light In You, Jonathan and Grasshopper decided they were best served being based at home in the Catskills for once. Surrounded by longtime friends such as engineer Scott Petito and bassist Anthony Molina, Jonathan and Grasshopper quickly found their stride recording themselves in their own basement studio as well as venturing out into the daylight to record tracks at some of their old haunts like NRS and White Light Studios. The two even found time to arrange backing vocal harmonies and record with Ken Stringfellow at his studio Son du Blé studios in Paris.