Vinyl lovers: early purchases from SP or your friendly local record store will net you the “Loser Edition” colored vinyl, blood red swirled into black.

We’ve released a third track from the record, “You as You Were.” Give it a listen below and download it free!

Meanwhile, the tour begins February 6. We’ve added some headlining US dates – check out the tour page or the list on the homepage. Keep an eye out for more dates in the near future.

If you haven’t heard it yet, listen to and download lead-off track “Breaking the Yearlings.”

And speaking of old allies, we’ll be touring with our friend (and former tour manager) Sharon Van Etten in February (dates here).

Stay tuned for more release information, artwork, and dates here and overseas, which we’ll be announcing soon.

For more frequent (and trivial) updates, you can also follow our Facebook page.

To celebrate, we’re releasing a couple of new items on our bandcamp page:

The first is a set of live recordings from the Island Arc performance in January , where we played Palo Santo, Rook, and The Golden Archipelago back-to-back. You can actually hear us blow a breaker at the end of “Hail, Mary”.

The second, Why I Love My Home (songs for Charles Burchfield) is a pair of long, experimental songs written and performed by JM for the Whitney Museum’s exhibit of Burchfield’s art. These are studio versions of the songs, recorded by Danny Reisch, who’ll be working with us on our new full-length. These songs will be pressed on beautiful 12″ vinyl next year as part of Graveface Records’ subscription-only charity singles compilation.

We’ve also been busy outside Shearwater – Thor’s been touring with Michael Gira’s reformed Swans, and is about to release a new instrumental album, Coy/Thor, and a thick book of terrifying/hilarious drawings, A Post-Apocalyptic Tale of Friendship, on Austin’s Monofonus Press. Kimberly’s new play, “Miss Tibet”, will be read at Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco on May 16th and 17th. And JM’s been guest-starring, playing piano and wurlitzer on Bill Callahan’s new Apocalypse and lending some vocals to Okkervil River’s I Am Very Far.

We may not be touring as a band before early 2012, when the new album’s set to drop, but we expect we’ll be going just about everywhere after that.

xo

SW

For the first time in several years, we mostly sat out SXSW, though we’ll probably to be back next year – the only SW-related performance was a live soundtrack to some footage shot by Scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie on the remote island of Tristan da Cunha last year.

We’ve just started work on a new and very different album, about which we’ll have some major news soon.

This will be a one-time-only event – we’ve never performed these thematically-linked albums in order, and probably never will again. We’ve also never played some of the songs live at all. We’ll be joined by old and new friends for this show, and we promise a really special evening for everyone.

Tickets are available here.

The Island Arc isn’t a farewell show, not by a long shot, but it does feel like a bookend. It’s a way for us to look back and to clear the way for what’s next – which we expect will be quite different from these records.

We begin work on a new album in early 2011 (JM).

It’s also been long enough since the release of The Golden Archipelago that we’re taking first steps toward new recordings. I cranked up my amp and spent a few hours making a big racket with Thor a few days ago. Felt great. Thor appeared just the other day in the New York Times for his recent tour with Michael Gira’s reactivated SWANS – a tour he left for one day to do our Matador @ 21 fest performance, volleying from Toronto to Las Vegas to Detroit in under 24 hours.

On the tour, we’ll have copies of our wild instrumental record, Shearwater Is Enron, for sale – it’s also available on this site in the store. SIE was a great way to blow off some steam after the more buttoned-down TGA sessions. It’s weird, playful, and beautiful, and includes fragments of the all-improv “Enron” set we played in Albuquerque back in April. It was recorded by our friend Rob Halverson and lovingly sorted, edited, and mixed by Kevin; Thor did the cover.

We’ll also have the few remaining copies of the Golden Dossier with us; a handful are available through the store while the very limited supply lasts.

Lastly, Blue Water White Death, my blitz-collaboration with Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu, was released on October 12th and greeted with bewilderment, dismay, and, occasionally, rapture. There’s a video Jamie made here which features strange landscapes, koans floating in space, and some extreme close-ups which may or may not be safe for work. You can order it online through Graveface Records. (JM).

A week later, we’ll be playing the ever-burgeoning Austin City Limits festival here in our hometown. They keep moving this later and later in the year in hopes of beating the heat; October 10th seems like a relatively safe bet for cooler weather and clear skies.

After that, plans are in the works for a return to the east coast in November – we’ll keep you posted.

The show at the Whitney museum in NYC with Andy Stack and Jonathan Rosen went well – we played two long, new songs, “The Sphinx and the Milky Way” and “Hymn to the Valences”, and filled that weird, concrete hall with choruses of frogs, cicadas, and swirls of guitar feedback. Also, if you missed the End of an Ear JM/Thor instore last week here in town, you missed this moment (pictured, photo by Ben Kim), as well as a mesmerizing amplified kalimba/vibraphone duel between Thor and Ralph White (JM).

First off, we’re starting a new European tour in mid-July; we’ll be revisiting some of our favorite places and adding new ones, including a long-overdue return to Scandinavia and our first-ever trips to Poland and Finland. We’ll also be playing at the Barbican in London as part of an exhibit of Andy Warhol’s “screen tests”.

JM will be performing at the Whitney Museum in NYC on the 25th June, among Charles Burchfield (1893-1967)’s hallucinatory watercolors of natural scenes. He’ll be joined by Andy Stack from Wye Oak and by author Jonathan Rosen, who will read excerpts from Burchfield’s mystical, reflective journals.

JM and Jamie Stewart (from Xiu Xiu)’s collaboration album, Blue Water White Death, will see release from Graveface records later in the year. We’ll have more details about that soon, but in the meantime there’s an article in the most recent issue of Tape Op magazine (required reading for every recording studio in the world, it seems) in which JM and JS geek out on recording and songwriting techniques.

In the meantime, work continues on a SW instrumental record, and a special show in the Austin City Limits studio in July, about which we’ll have more details soon. We also plan to return to touring stateside in the fall. Onward!

DOWNLOAD: We’d also like to share this live version of “Meridian” (mp3), recorded at Lincoln Hall in Chicago on April 4, 2010.

NEW DOWNLOAD: “God Made Me” (mp3), also recorded at Lincoln Hall in Chicago.

Photo courtesy Chad Wadsworth

We’re also in the middle of planning out the rest of the year, which will include a return trip to Europe (if the ash cloud ever clears) and, we hope, parts of the US we’ve missed this time around. I’ll leave you with this mysterious clip, from a reading of Thor’s book in Lawrence Kansas…a memorable moment, to be sure (JM).