Will Butler + Sister Squares announce their new self-titled album set for release on 22nd September via Merge Records and release its lead single ‘Long Grass‘. Sister Squares are a New York quartet rooted as much in dance and theatre as they are in music and come comprised of Butler’s wife Jenny Shore, her sister Julie, their childhood friend Sara Dodds and drummer Miles Francis. Together they played a run of shows in August 2022, airing out studio ideas in live rooms. The album is a result of creativity in Figure 8 studios in Brooklyn, group experiments from Butler’s basement and sessions in Francis’ Synthia Studio. Butler left Arcade Fire in March 2022 and states:
“I had quit my band Arcade Fire very recently, after 20 years—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.”
Butler expands on the inspiration behind lead single ‘Long Grass’:
“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 UK and EU Tour Dates
November
7th | Riga, LV – Palladium
10th | Berlin, DE – Privatclub
12th | Aarhus, DK – VoxHall
14th | Rotterdam, NL – Rotown
15th | Paris, FR – Café de la Danse
16th | Brussels, BE – Botanique
17th | London, UK – ICA
18th | Dublin, IE – Whelan’s
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