Mystery Jets have detailed their new album, A Hole to See the Sky Through, out August 21 via Fiction. It's the band's seventh record and the follow-up to A Billion Heartbeats, an album singer Blaine Harrison wrote while living as a property guardian in an abandoned London building surrounded by Brexit protests and Black Lives Matter demonstrations between 2016 and 2019.
The new record takes its title and cover art, with Yoko Ono's blessing, from a 1960s artwork of hers: a cream sheet of paper with a circular cutout meant as a lookout onto the sky. Harrison discovered a replica in the British Museum, bought his own, and kept it by his front door as a daily reminder, until a 2020 tour shutdown gave him time to sit with it and start writing what became the album's title track.
"We're turning our gaze upwards. We're trying to discover hope and joy," Harrison said of the album's approach, describing a five-year writing process built around a giant wallpaper mindmap that he, his father and bandmate Henry Harrison used to plot each song's emotional arc and its connections to the rest.
Producer Leo Abrahams, known for his work with Brian Eno, Wild Beasts and Frightened Rabbit, gave the band a chance to step back creatively for the first time in two albums, according to drummer Kapil Trivedi, who said letting go of the reins let the group focus on delivering the songs rather than second-guessing every decision.
Harrison frames A Hole to See the Sky Through as the accidental third chapter in a trilogy that began with Curve of the Earth's cosmic distance in 2016 and continued with A Billion Heartbeats' street-level urgency, before this record lifts off again. Lead single "Black Sage" was the last song recorded and the first released, while "Soul River" leans into empty space between verses to sit with themes of loneliness, addiction and grief.
A Hole to See the Sky Through is out now via Fiction and joins the rest of the fall's indie releases on the release calendar, with Mystery Jets set to tour the UK in November, including stops in Manchester, London and Portsmouth.
The facts
- New album A Hole to See the Sky Through out August 21 via Fiction
- Seventh album, following A Billion Heartbeats and 2016's Curve of the Earth
- Title and artwork borrowed, with her blessing, from a 1960s Yoko Ono piece
- Produced by Leo Abrahams, who has worked with Brian Eno and Wild Beasts
- Lead single 'Black Sage' was the last song recorded and first released
- Band tours the UK in November, including Manchester, London and Portsmouth
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