Nickel Creek Announce Celebrants, First Album in Nine Years

After an extended hiatus that saw all three of its members reaching new heights of acclaim in the music industry, Americana/bluegrass supergroup Nickel Creek has reunited to release and tour on their first new album in nine years. Today, the group announced the release of Celebrants, out March 24 via Thirty Tigers. They also dropped the first single of the album, “Strangers,” with an embedded video you can watch below. Speaking on the song, founding member Chris Thile said the following: “This song is an exploration of the ostensibly rewarding but often awkward, even excruciating act of catching up with an old friend. Can the connection be reforged? Should it be?””

Since releasing their last album, 2014’s A Dotted Line, each member of Nickel Creek has been constantly busy. Thile hosted American radio variety show Live From Here (formerly A Prairie Home Companion) from 2016-2020, until the show concluded. Sean Watkins released solo material and recorded with fellow Nickel Creek member Sara Watkins in the sibling project Watkins Family Hour. And Sara may have been the most dizzyingly active of all, working on the aforementioned sibling duo, along with Grammy-winning roots trio supergroup I’m With Her, alongside Aoife O’Donovan and Sarah Jarosz. She’s likewise recorded in recent years with everyone from Phoebe Bridgers to The Killers.

Celebrants, meanwhile, apparently “explores the inherent dynamics of human connection,” according to the band, across a surprisingly lush 18 tracks that “address love, friendship and time with lyrics both poetic and plain-spoken, as they see bridges built, crossed, burned and rebuilt.” The album was recorded at Nashville’s RCA Studio A, where the band will return to debut the new material with three “very special” sold-out shows at the historic Ryman Auditorium on April 27, 28 and 29. Additional tour dates will be announced soon.

“This is a record about embracing the friction inherent in real human connection,” says the band’s statement. “We begin the record yearning for and pursuing harmonious connection. We end the record having realized that truly harmonious connection can only be achieved through the dissonance that we’ve spent our entire adult lives trying to avoid.”

Check out “Strangers,” and its scintillating violin work from Sara Watkins, below.