Trace Mountains Announces New Album Lost in the Country, Shares Contemplative Title Track

There’s always a new beginning in an end: In the wake of the 2018 dissolution of LVL UP, the band he co-founded in college, Dave Benton has returned to his Trace Mountains moniker, announcing the April 10 release of his new album, Lost in the Country, on Lame-O Records, and sharing its wonderful title track.

“A lot of the songs on this record feel like a bit of an awakening for me, but this one especially,” says Benton of his new single. “It’s so easy to get caught up in the details of your own life and lose important things along the way. ‘Lost in the Country’ is a song about regret and reaching out for the missing things.”

As Benton’s bio points out, “Lost in the Country” finds him channeling The War on Drugs (the lyric “a deeper understanding” even appears) and Kurt Vile to mesmerizing and poignant effect, with the song’s bright acoustic guitars belying the depth of its somber introspection. Benton recalls a moment at a venue “in the cool dark country,” where he sat, overwhelmed with emotion and, comforted by a stranger, contemplated “The ways we think about ourselves in this moment / in all the years gone by / in all the people that we pass by / in what might happen if we actually looked them in the eye.”

Benton released his debut album as Trace Mountains, A Partner to Lean On, in March 2018, just a couple of months before LVL UP’s break-up. He’s since relocated to Kingston, a small city in New York’s Hudson Valley, and made more of an effort to write candidly, “finding a creative process that requires me to be honest with myself,” as he explains. But Lost in the Country is hardly a solo effort, to hear Benton tell it: He credits his collaborators Jim Hill (Slight Of), Sean Henry and Susannah Cutler (Yours Are the Only Ears), as well as his former LVL UP bandmate Greg Rutkin (Cende), as key contributors.