For a Good Time, Call: Bat for Lashes Teases New Album with Hotline Number

Bat for Lashes is back with another cryptic hint for her forthcoming release—this time, in the form of a hotline.

For the past three days, Natasha Khan of Bat for Lashes has been releasing short videos via her Instagram containing snippets of unreleased music and fragments of a story about an Internet couple meeting in real life.

The videos don’t seem to be organized in any specific order: The first video finds a man speaking to a camera on the beach and frantically stating that he has “no idea where she is … I don’t know what to do. She’s nowhere.” The second finds Khan sitting in a car with the man from the previous video, introducing herself as “Nikki” and saying: “We’ve decided to make a little film, and this is our first meeting.”

Puzzle pieces begin to connect in the fourth video, where the man is alone at an airport drop-off and says he’s picking up “Nikki” from the airport. The man confesses that he’s a little nervous because they’ve “been speaking online for so long. I’ve never actually met her in person.”

Khan’s fifth and most recent video finds the man hanging up missing person flyers around his neighborhood with a soft synth playing behind him. The flyer reads:

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS LOST GIRL? IF YOU CAN HELP – PLEASE CALL: 213-675-6673

Upon calling the hotline, the man’s voice sounds through the speakers, begging the caller to leave a message if they have any information on Nikki’s whereabouts. The caller is then notified that the mailbox is full, but the operator prompts them to press “5” to leave an SMS notification (at which point the number is presumably signed up for a text-alert list for updates on Khan’s releases).

The Bat for Lashes website has been updated to show a digital form of the missing person flyer, where, now in focus, it reads: “Last seen at sunset on Balboa pier …. Said she was being hunted. Strange powers in the night hours …. Are you afraid of lost girls?”

But that’s it—the end. Call again next time.

A fiend for constructing colorful stories and alternate realities for each of her albums (Khan’s latest studio album The Bride follows the story of a woman embarking on her honeymoon alone after her fiancé dies in a car crash on the way to their wedding), it is not surprising that the musician has taken to social media to tease her new music in the most intricate manner possible.

Although the specifics of Khan’s new concept are not known, it is clear that the missing girl found in the string of videos, Khan’s Nikki character, is at the center of the album.

Earlier this week, the musician posted a photo of a sunset on Instagram accompanied by the caption “10/06,” seemingly hinting towards a release early next week. Since posting the photo, the musician has updated her bio to reflect the same date (with an added UFO emoji, so … there’s that).

Stay tuned for further updates on Khan’s forthcoming release.

Check out the newest installment in Khan’s album teasers below and revisit Paste’s 2012 interview with the musician here.