The Antlers have returned with news of ‘Blight’, their first album in four years – listen to lead single ‘Carnage’ below.
The New York duo, currently comprising singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Peter Silberman and drummer Michael Lerner, will release the album on October 10 via Transgressive Records, and it’s available to pre-order here.
‘Carnage’ is a brooding slow burner, starting off mellow before erupting around Lerner’s drums and then descending into fuzz, with hard-hitting lyrics describing violence against animals encountered on a road trip.
“Carnage’ is a song about a kind of violence we rarely acknowledge — violence not born of cruelty, but of convenience,” said Silberman of the track. “Innocent creatures are swept up in the path of destruction as their world collides with ours, and we barely notice.”
Check the single out here:
Following the release of their sixth album, ‘Green To Gold’, in 2021, the band shared a selection of standalone singles. Silberman’s ambient supergroup side project, Cowboy Sadness, released an album last year, too.
After the warmer, folk-infused ‘Green To Gold’, ‘Blight’ is set to take a look at human wastefulness and devastation with more direct lyrics over a variety of sounds. It was recorded over the course of a few years in Silberman’s New York home studio at the edge of a vast hayfield.
“So much of the record was conceived while walking these massive fields,” Silberman explained. “I felt like I was wandering around an abandoned planet.”
He added: “The consequences of accelerating technology and environmental neglect feel imminent; that sense of urgency made me want to speak more candidly. The present-day specifics are so unsettling, and tomorrow’s possibilities are so surreal … there’s no need to mince words.”
The ‘Blight’ tracklist is:
- ‘Consider The Source’
- ‘Pour’
- ‘Carnage’
- ‘Blight’
- ‘Something In The Air’
- ‘Deactivate’
- ‘Calamity’
- ‘A Great Flood’
- ‘They Lost All of Us’
Last month, The Antlers played a handful of shows with Texas indie rockers Okkervil River as part of their ‘An Intimate Evening with The Antlers & Okkervil River’ tour, the first leg of which happened in October 2024.
A live album from the tour, ‘Band Together’, came out on April 30 this year.
