Straw Man Army drop the electricity on the acoustic album True North

Straw Man Army have named their next album True North and put out a song from it, Striking Home, and the notable part is what is missing from it. The New York duo have made the record entirely acoustic, which for a band whose whole sound has been built on amplification is a change of instrument rather than a change of mood.

Their first three albums were a unit. The trilogy opened with Age Of Exile in 2020 and closed with Earthworks two years ago, and Stereogum describes the music across them as psychedelic post-punk carrying krautrock dynamics and large-scale concepts, the sort of thing that works because a rhythm section keeps grinding underneath it.

True North is described as a concept album too, just a different kind. That is the framing Stereogum uses: the band are not abandoning the approach that made the trilogy work, they are stripping out the volume and seeing what holds.

For a two-piece the arithmetic of that decision is unforgiving. A duo playing loud can fill a room with distortion and repetition; a duo playing acoustic has two instruments and two voices and nothing to hide behind, which is why the switch usually happens to solo songwriters rather than to bands built on drone.

Striking Home is the first evidence of how it sounds. It arrives with the announcement rather than after it, so the song is doing the work of explaining the change instead of a press release.

No release date has been set, and Stereogum gives no label or tracklist, so True North exists at the moment as a title, a method and one song. The album will be listed on the release calendar with the rest of the autumn's indie and rock announcements once a date arrives.