The Antlers have announced their first new album in four years; Blight arrives October 10 via Transgressive. The band is sharing lead single “Carnage” today as well, which comes with a lyric video that you can check out below.
Discussing the backstory of the new song, the Antlers frontman Peter Silberman says, “‘Carnage’ is a song about a kind of violence we rarely acknowledge — violence not born of cruelty, but of convenience. Innocent creatures are swept up in the path of destruction as their world collides with ours, and we barely notice.”
Blight spans nine songs and serves as the follow-up to 2021’s Green to Gold. Silberman and longtime drummer Michael Lerner invoke adventurous arrangements while touching on themes of wastefulness, environmental devastation, and our passive destruction. The majority of Blight’s tracks were recorded in upstate New York at Silverman’s home studio.
“These singles were metaphysical songs about connection with nature, which in turn put me in touch with all the ways that nature is under threat,” adds Silberman. “The smell of wildfire smoke on a sunny afternoon, the sound of chainsaws on a hike through the woods — these contradictions became impossible to ignore.”
Read about the Antlers’ classic album Hospice in “The Top 50 Albums of 2009” and revisit Jayson Greene’s essay “What Can Music Do During Climate Collapse?”
