Typhoon Announce New Album Offerings, Share First Movement “Floodplains”

Typhoon—an 11-member indie-folk monster birthed from the prophetic mists of Salem, Ore.—has appeared on our best new artist roundups, best album lists and everything in between. They’ve now announced their fourth studio album Offerings, out Jan. 12 on Roll Call Records, and shared the first movement, clocking in at 21 minutes of madness. The first movement is titled “Floodplains,” and consists of the songs “Wake,” “Rorschach,” “Empiricist” and “Algernon.”

“I wanted this record to be a journey, like Dante’s Inferno. It kicks off with ‘Wake,’ where the character wakes up and he’s shitting the bed and doesn’t know what’s going on. I was going for a specific feel that Samuel Beckett does so well,” said singer/songwriter Kyle Morton in a statement, referencing Beckett’s Three Novels.

Offerings offers four total movements (“Floodplains,” “Flood,” “Reckoning” and “Afterparty”) to represent the mental phases the mysterious main character goes through: He realizes that something is amiss, struggles through chaos and accepts before facing fate. Themes of memory and loss run amok, backed by the whirlwind of horns and a sense of impending doom continued from 2013’s White Lighter.

“I’ve always been preoccupied with memory, losing memory, and trying to recapture memory,” Morton explains. “I wanted to explore the questions: What does a person become if they don’t know where they came from? What is the essential quality of the person if you strip away all memory?”

You can listen to “Floodplains” below, and preorder a limited-edition vinyl variant of Offerings here. Also below: revisit a favorite Typhoon moment, as Kyle Morton sings into senselessness his “Dreams of Cannibalism.”