Shannon Lay Announces New Album, Shares Video for Lead Single
Image via Sub Pop
Indie-folk artist Shannon Lay has announced a new album titled August, set for release in its titular month, on Aug. 23. She’s also laid out her new lead single, “Nowhere,” alongside a fresh music video.
The 12-track LP will be the latest from the Los Angeles singer-songwriter since her 2017 record Living Water and is her debut release on Sub Pop, the label credited with popularizing grunge through Seattle groups Nirvana and Mudhoney, among others.
The album’s title, August, refers to the month in 2017 that the transcendent folk-pop songstress quit her day job and fully dedicated herself to her music. She calls the month her liberation as an artist.
“It’s a thank you to the universe,” Lay said of her new album in a statement.
Lay takes us to her blissful “Nowhere” in her chilled-out new track. The video features kaleidoscopic images of Lay transposed over travel footage of waves, flowers and blue skies as she sings, “Soon we’ll get to nowhere, and we’ll talk to no one and not meet them.”
“It’s about getting somewhere and not doing anything or meeting anyone,” Lay explains, “the idea of just having a quieter journey, zero expectation.”
The video features tranquil settings plucked from different areas around Lay’s home as she sings about the bounty of spring, and urges us to enjoy the journey and embrace the unknown with the words, “Nobody knows where I am going. Just close my eyes and I find, find, find a place in my dreams.”
Described as an uplifting aural baptism, the album as a whole promises to capture Lay’s renewed purpose in making music using lush, yet simple natural imagery and the bare bones of mostly guitar and her voice. A recurring river metaphor also snakes through the full-length, driving the lyrics and composition forward, Lay said.
“I always picture music as this river,” Lay said. “Everyone’s throwing things into this river. It’s a place you can go to and feed off of that energy and feel nourished by the fact that so many people are feeling what you’re feeling. It’s this beautiful exchange.”
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