Sylvan Esso have just released Ow ∞: their first new album in four years, and first to be released on their own record label, Psychic Hotline. Named one of the “buzziest projects” The New York Times is looking forward to this fall, Ow ∞ is a trust fall into our dystopian present, past and future – arms wide open, embracing and absorbing the pain of cities under water or on fire, and piecing oneself back together as a tactile, scotch-taped collage of memories, ephemera, Y2K-era burned CDs and backseat makeouts.
Produced by Sylvan Esso‘s Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, and bringing together 12 of their most collaborative, improvisational and experimental songs to date, Ow ∞ marks the longest the band has ever spent writing a record, but arrives with an intense immediacy that is messy, hellish and free, metabolising a life of making music with people into making art that you just love.
Listen to Ow ∞ on vinyl, CD, cassette and digitally via Psychic Hotline – further illustrated through an immersive world of animated characters and iconography by artist Eric Timothy Carlson – and watch the new video for “Sledge,” written in the shadow of Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles fires, as it channels apocalyptic anxiety into a fierce affirmation of destruction, control and surrender.
Created, reimagined and revisited nearly every day since 2022, in the woods of their studio Betty’s in Chapel Hill, NC, Ow ∞ is both a technicolor totem of personal destruction, and an ecstatic invitation to party. From highlights like “Hot Slob” to “Concrete Glen” and “On & On,” most of the tracks on Ow ∞ are Meath’s first vocal takes, while arrangements and ideas are excavated, painted over and held together by the largest community of musicians Sylvan Esso have ever worked with on an LP.
Featuring six different drummers in total, as well as live guitar, bass, keys, vibraphone, woodwinds, Innato, organ, piano and electronics, Meath and Sanborn are joined by Daniel Aged (Frank Ocean, Dijon), BJ Burton (Bon Iver, Charli XCX), Matt Douglas (the Mountain Goats), Glenn Kotche (Wilco), Jake Luppen (Hippo Campus, Samia), TJ Maiani (Weyes Blood, Neneh Cherry), James Mapley-Brittle (GRRL), Buddy Ross (Frank Ocean, Bon Iver), Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes) and Joe Westerlund (Megafaun) throughout the record, filling hard drives with 5-10 songs at a time, some sticking and some not.
But for an album that wrestles so much with the out-of-control nature of being alive, Ow ∞ meets Meath and Sanborn at a time where, finally, they have complete control over what Sylvan Esso can be: putting things out the way they want to, with the people they choose, in their own studio and through their own label.
SYLVAN ESSO
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