Denver’s Wayfarer have released ‘Grey Country’, the third and final single from their sixth album Riders Of The Setting Sun, due 20th November via Vesperian. For the track, the band enlist Munly J Munly and Rebecca Vera, two enduring voices of Denver’s dark americana underworld known for their work with Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Munly & The Lupercalians and DBUK. Following David Eugene Edwards’ appearance on ‘Perdition’s Crossing‘, they bring yet another of that scene’s defining voices to the record.
One of the album’s darkest reckonings, ‘Grey Country’ moves like a funeral procession across a land stripped bare. Slow-burning and steeped in dread, it stares into the long shadow of inheritance, the weight of old sins and the things we carry long after everything else has turned to dust. Munly’s unmistakable voice rises from the wreckage, meeting Wayfarer’s sparse, spectral instrumentation somewhere between confession and lament. This is the sound of a country with blood on its hands and nowhere left to bury its dead.
Produced by Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), Riders Of The Setting Sun finds Wayfarer venturing beyond their extreme metal roots into a desolate strain of gothic americana, where post-punk, folk and rock ’n’ roll drift through the dust. The result is a portrait of the American West with its mythology stripped away: beautiful, brutal and haunted by everything it would rather forget.
For Wayfarer, the American West has never been merely a backdrop. It is a character. A memory. A wound. Formed in Denver, Colorado, the band have spent more than a decade developing a sound as vast and unforgiving as the landscape that surrounds them, building a singular strain of dark americana from the mythology, history and haunted beauty of the Western United States.
For the first time, Wayfarer have joined forces with visionary producer Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), with recording and mixing contributions from James Barone (Beach House) and Iver Sandøy (Enslaved). The result is a record that feels simultaneously ancient and unfamiliar, a strange collision of Western dust, nocturnal highways, widescreen guitars and songs that sound as though they have been waiting for decades to be uncovered.
It is dark americana, but not the sepia-toned kind. This is the America after the sunset. The ghosts. The gamblers. The drifters. The dead. The beautiful things that should probably have been left buried.
Adding further weight to the album’s lineage, Riders Of The Setting Sun features a remarkable cast of collaborators including David Eugene Edwards (16 Horsepower, Wovenhand), Munly J Munly, Midwife and Kelly Schilling (Dreadnought), while Steve Von Till (Neurosis) provides the spoken introduction to ‘The Dusklands’.
The album also features Wayfarer‘s own take on Kris Kristofferson‘s ‘Casey’s Last Ride’, a song that sits naturally within the band’s dark americana world, its tale of loneliness, regret and a man disappearing into the night echoing the album’s broader fascination with the darker corners of American mythology.
With album artwork created by celebrated artist Tony Stella, whose distinctive film-poster work has become synonymous with some of cinema’s most iconic visual worlds, the artwork for Riders Of The Setting Sun feels less like an album cover than the poster for a lost Western, a film that perhaps never existed, but somehow feels familiar. It would also become one of Stella‘s final works before his passing earlier this year.
Riders Of The Setting Sun will be available on Digipak CD, cassette and vinyl LP, with the vinyl edition featuring a dedicated LP booklet and OBI strip.
Stream the new single and pre-order Riders Of The Setting Sun here: https://tr.ee/vesperian_wayfarer