Following a run of tour dates with hotly-tipped contemporaries Coldbones, Blackpool cinematic-rock band Blanket are extremely pleased to reveal details of their long-awaited debut album How To Let Go, which is set for release on 18th May via Music For Nations (Sony).
The album will be released on CD, vinyl and digital formats.
To celebrate the news, the quartet have today shared the video for the album’s lead single Worlds Collide which has today been added to the Spotify New Music Friday playlist, with their music also already receiving airplay from Alex Baker at Kerrang! Radio and Daniel P Carter at the BBCR1 Rock Show.
As with much of their creative output, the video was filmed on location in their hometown of Blackpool and was devised, shot and directed by the band themselves.
Speaking exclusively to PROG Magazine about the record, bass player Matthew Sheldon said: ‘The album title is about letting go of the things that held us back creatively previously, and realising how unimportant boundaries are, and how they’re self-imposed.’
‘We try not to be a fully instrumental band,’ adds frontman Bobby Pook ‘I kind of think that we might as well use voices as an instrument. I love how diverse music can be and how many different emotions it can bring out in you.’
How To Let Go, the quartet’s debut full-length album, takes dexterous ambient textures and amplifies them through a deeply resonant, emotional filter. It’s a blissful 55-minute exploration of imagination, wonder and the human spirit, designed to uplift, enchant and provide a beatific escape from an often harsh and confounding reality. Gorgeous, textures lap over the listener, like a wave of euphoria as the band’s sound builds to an overwhelming crescendo; it’s wondrous music, designed to inspire vivid minds and transport the listener to a euphoric state of consciousness.
One moment, blanket can evoke the fragility and desolation of a lone survivor drifting through the vast reaches of the cosmos, whilst the next they can be as cacophonous as the sound of the entire universe collapsing in on itself. Its dazzling ambition far outreaches what most bands even attempt on their debut album.
Despite vocals being sparse, there’s a very strong connection to the human condition throughout How To Let Go’s 10 tracks. Themes of the universe and our place within it as well as our own mental well-being are pertinent throughout the record. It’s a record that encourages us to seek change within ourselves if we want to see change in the universe as a whole. How To Let Go acts as a beacon for human-kind, providing momentary stabilisation in an often topsy-turvy, tumultuous world.
How To Let Go is released 18th May 2018 via Music For Nations
How To Let Go tracklist:
1. How To Let Go
2. The Devil Holds Fast Your Eyelids
3. Our Tired Hearts
4. Worlds Collide
5. Let The Sleepers Awake
6. Beacons
7. Turn Ourselves To Stone
8. This Moment Right Here
9. A Sky Filled With Ghosts
10. Immemorial Sea