Cult London band Mystery Jets share the deeply personal new single, ‘Soul River’, from newly announced seventh album, A Hole To See The Sky Through.
Written in memory of a close family friend and cherished figure on their hometown of Eel Pie Island – described by the band as a “guardian spirit” of the community – the song pays tribute to a life lost to suicide.
Spanning five poignant minutes, ‘Soul River’ showcases Mystery Jets’ remarkable breadth as songwriters, pairing an unforgettable melody with some of their most affecting and heartfelt lyrics to date. The release follows recent singles ‘Black Sage’ and the album’s title track, ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through I’, all of which will appear on the forthcoming record when it arrives on August 21 via Fiction Records.
Listen to ‘Soul River’ on Red Devils Records.
Titled after Yoko Ono’s minimalist masterpiece of the same name, and featuring the original work – a simple white postcard with a circle cut out – on its album cover having been granted special permission by the artist herself, A Hole To See The Sky Through finds the band fighting fear with the best tools they have: imagination, joy, and the sort of boundless, irresistible melodies that have kept them at the heart of British guitar music for the past 20 years.
Written over the years since their 2020 last release, and then recorded with producer Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Wild Beasts, Frightened Rabbit) at his East London HQ, A Hole To See The Sky Through is filled with ideas of freedom and forgiveness, trauma and wisdom. If 2016’s Curve of the Earth was written from the skies, looking back down, and A Billion Heartbeats rooted itself firmly in the trenches of “the culture wars, and protests, and a very street-level perspective”, then their newest completes the trilogy by casting its gaze “back up from the void, to the cosmic again”. It’s an album with a clear, coherent point of view, comprising nine songs that all form fragments of a thematic whole.
Formed in the early 2000s on Eel Pie Island in London, Mystery Jets have earned a reputation for eccentric songwriting, inventive arrangements, and a distinctive fusion of indie rock, psychedelic pop, and progressive influences. Celebrating 20 years of Making Dens, 10 years of Curve of the Earth, and now a whole new album birth too, Mystery Jets are still going strong because they’ve still got this curiosity and desire to keep pushing themselves forward. They’ve got something to say and, on A Hole To See The Sky Through, they’ve found a new way of saying it.
The band recently announced a new run of UK & Ireland headline dates for November, including shows at London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town and Manchester’s O2 Ritz.
