Cosmic folk explorers Blitzen Trapper have been fairly quiet since they released VII in 2013 but today they release their brand new single ‘Magical Thinking‘ and announce that they’ve signed with the excellent label Yep Roc Records and will release their new LP Holy Smokes Future Jokes on August 28th, 2020.

Check out the single below, via the visualiser video clip. The song is a wonderful slice of psych folk that drifts and floats along like a leaf heading downstream. It gives an insight to where their sound is heading on the new album where countrified folk meets tripped-out singer-songwriter and avant indie art-pop. From what we’ve heard so far the album is delightfully light on the ears but hits deep in one’s mind and soul.

Led by existential questions about life and death, Holy Smokes Future Jokes finds frontman Eric Earley ruminating on the intermediate period between a person’s separate lives on earth, “and what it means to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth,” he explains.

Recorded at Long Play Recording in Portland, OR, Holy Smokes Future Jokes takes the listener on a wild and dramatic journey through the Bardo, that transitional state between death and rebirth. With an inherent otherworldliness in the lyrics and imagery, the album’s ten songs take inspiration from several works, notably George Saunders’ 2017 Lincoln in the Bardo, which led to Bardo Thodol, more commonly known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

“I became obsessed with it, “Earley notes. “All the ideas contained in that book were speaking to me in a lot of different ways. The main theme that kept drawing me in when I was writing was what I call ‘cosmic humility,’ he adds. “It’s the idea that humanity is not the center of the universe or even the center of our own universe here on earth. We’re not the most important thing.”