Death Cab For Cutie have shared ‘Foxglove Through The Clearcut’, the third single to be lifted from the band’s upcoming album ‘Asphalt Meadows’ ahead of its arrival next month.
The new song begins slow-moving and meditative, with frontman Ben Gibbard delivering spoken-word verses, before building to a searing crescendo of distorted guitars and propulsive drums.
“‘Foxglove’ is by far the most personal song on the record,” Gibbard said of the new single in a statement. “While I was writing it, I thought I was merely the narrator. But the longer I sat with it, I realized I was both the protagonist and the narrator.” Listen below:
Death Cab For Cutie announced ‘Asphalt Meadows’ in May alongside lead single ‘Roman Candles’. The album’s second single, ‘Here To Forever’, arrived last month. The album, the band’s 10th, will be released on September 16 via Atlantic, following on from 2018’s ‘Thank You For Today’.
Since that album arrived, the band has kept fairly busy. Their last release was the ‘Georgia’ EP, a collection of five covers that came out in 2020 via Bandcamp and was later made available on streaming platforms. Last year, a newly remastered, 35-track reissue of 2001 LP ‘The Photo Album’ arrived.
During an interview with Last March, Gibbard discussed how the songs on the upcoming album were written at a time of reflection on his own life and mortality amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “There is a theme of the loss of time and the finite amount of it that we all have,” he said.
“This last year of our lives has put a fine point on the fact that we are all mortal and only here for a brief period of time. It goes by quicker than you think.” He added: “Love and death are always big things for me, but there’s a new component about how quickly time moves and how impermanent our existence here truly is.”
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