Will Butler + Sister Squares have announced their new self-titled album, which will be out on September 22 on Merge Records. The follow-up to 2020’s Generations includes the previously released track ‘Willows’, as well as a new single, ‘Long Grass’. Check it out below.
Sister Squares — Sara Dobbs, Julie Shore, Jenny Shore, and Miles Francis — have been touring and recording with Butler for nearly a decade. “I met Jenny—my wife!—in college, the year before I joined Arcade Fire,” Butler explained. “When I needed a band to tour Policy, I asked [Jenny’s sister] Julie to join because I trusted her musically. And I asked Sara, Jenny and Julie’s childhood friend, because I knew she was super talented.”
“After Generations, I considered making a weird solo record,” Butler remarked. “Me alone in the basement, etc., etc. Mostly I realised that what I wanted was the opposite.” He ended up co-producing the record with Francis, who commented: “Will and I organically discovered our relationship as a production duo through making this album. We didn’t have to talk too much about things as they happened, because the music just flowed. As a producer, working with Jenny, Julie, and Sara is the dream. They connect so innately. In one motion they can conjure a mood, or get at the root of a feeling.”
In a press release, Butler also said leaving Arcade Fire was “maybe the most complex decision of my life. I had spent the preceding two years at home with my three children. I was 39 years old. I was waking up every morning and reading Emily Dickinson, until I had read every Emily Dickinson poem. I was listening to Morrissey, to Shostakovich, to the Spotify top 50. I had unformed questions with inchoate answers. But, honestly, I was feeling great about the record.”
Of the album’s lead single, he added: “I had read this novella called Jamila by a Soviet/Kyrgyz author named Chingiz Aitmatov from the ’50s. It’s about an artist looking back on his childhood in a small town in Kyrgyzstan in WWII. It’s about love, and becoming an artist, and melancholy, and vast landscapes with a single train track running through them. And it reminded me of young adulthood, of wandering moodily down the train tracks. Maybe the song is also about leaving behind the things that formed us, but trying to remember the world as it used to be?”
Will Butler + Sister Squares Cover Artwork:
Will Butler + Sister Squares Tracklist:
1. Open
2. Stop Talking
3. Willows
4. Long Grass
5. Me & My Friends
6. Saturday Night
7. Car Crash
8. Sunlight
9. Arrow of Time
10. I Am Standing in a Room
11. Good Friday, 1613
12. Old Year
13. Hee Loop
14. The Window
