Mystery Jets have returned after a six-year absence with the raucous single ‘Black Sage’ – check it out below.
The Twickenham band last released a studio album in 2020 in the form of ‘A Billion Heartbeats’, their seventh LP, but it appears that they are embarking on a new era.
‘Black Sage’ is out now, via Fiction Records, and it has been made in collaboration with producer Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Frightened Rabbit). Riding in on a feedback-laden guitar buzz, the track is a pulsating, growling psych rock beast, with Blaine Harrison singing: “The remedy is in the poison / The blessing is in the curse / Cuz beauty lies in the broken / And the cracks allow the light through us”.
Check out the song here, as well as a live performance of it, filmed at the James Turrell Skyspace in Cornwall:
Frontman Blaine Harrison has said: “For centuries, black sage has been used by indigenous communities in smudging ceremonies, where the smoke is believed to clear away negative energies or unwanted spirits. But what if we are vessels for those energies, and the ghosts from our pasts have been living inside us all along?”
“The message of the song is that healing is inseparable from suffering, but there is beauty to be found in the broken. Some songs arrive all at once, but ‘Black Sage’ came to life by stitching together a patchwork of extended jam sessions, where we’d loop ideas around and improvise until we reached a kind of hypnotic flow state, allowing the song to reveal to us what it wanted to become. We’ve not written that way since the very earliest days of the band, so we knew it had to be the first track to share from this new chapter”.
In 2022, the band’s bassist Jack Flanagan launched a solo career, releasing the album ‘Rides The Sky’, which included the psychedelic single ‘Skyhorse X Skyhorse’.
Mystery Jets released their sixth studio album ‘A Billion Heartbeats’ in 2020. “With protest songs and celebrations of the NHS all part of their new identity, it’s a wildly successful take on the world at large as the band enter a new decade,” NME wrote of the album in a four-star review.
Mystery Jets also shared covers album ‘Home Protests’ in 2020. Explaining how they recorded the album in lockdown, the Jets said: “As the world ground to a halt, with global lockdowns and illnesses, we continued to protest from our homes: recording lo-fi live covers of nine timeless tracks spanning the last half-century. Songs tackling perennial issues from discrimination and homelessness to war, consumer capitalism and environmental destruction.”
They are due to play at The Maccabees’ show at Leeds’ Kirkstall Abbey on July 31, alongside Maximo Park and Everything Everything.