Juanita Stein – new album ‘The Weightless Hour’ out now + Watch new video for ‘Motionless’ the focus track

Juanita Stein has today released her fourth solo album ‘The Weightless Hour’ via Agricultural Audio. The Howling Bells front-woman has just finished a UK tour supporting Evan Dando and is doing a series of in-store shows including one at London’s Rough Trade West this evening, before joining Travis on their UK dates in December.

Having recently released singles ‘Mother Natures Scorn‘ and ‘Carry Me‘, today is the turn of focus track ‘Motionless‘. Juanita explains the song “is about my inability to remain still, I have an inexplicable desire to keep moving no matter what, how or when. I’d rather have the car drive in reverse than have it sit still. I’d rather the train head in any direction, than stall on the tracks. I’m acknowledging that I hold my breath through the pain of things and rather than sit and deal with the discomfort, I’ll move in any other direction. I’m constantly learning, as I think a lot of us are, how to be motionless”.  

The video, directed by Orlando Cubitt and filmed by Elliot Dupuy, was recorded along the South Coast, from Brighton to Newhaven and in between. She recalls “It was an outrageously blustery day, with gusts of winds of up to 50 mph, which made things quite challenging for us! At one point Orlando was holding Elliot up with the camera, myself, sat in a car that I could feel swaying form left to right. However, I believe this contributed to a genuine moodiness throughout the video. We did a lot of filming inside the car and at my home studio, which worked well, as that’s where I’m mostly rehearsing and creating, so a genuine insight, along with the scenery around where I live”.

THE WEIGHTLESS HOUR – TRACKLISTING
1. The Weightless Hour
2. Mother Natures Scorn
3. The Game
4. Old World
5. Carry Me
6. Motionless
7. Daily Rituals
8. Ceremony
9. Driving Nowhere
10. Delilah

’The Weightless Hour’ sees Stein join forces once more with long-time collaborator, the producer Ben Hillier (see also: Depeche Mode, Doves, Blur, Elbow). After originally teaming up for 2020’s Snapshot, Stein’s third record, which was built from collected fragments of grief following the loss of her father, it was Hillier’s penchant for minimalism – his instinct for risk-taking while stripping sounds back to their gleaming bones – that aligned with her vision for her fourth project. 

In removing most instrumental additions beyond the guitar (and you will notice there are no drums on the LP), with ‘The Weightless Hour’, Stein made a subconscious choice to make the project entirely her own. In the space freed by the stripped-back instrumentation, her storytelling bleeds freely like watercolours across a blank page. The album is an intensely human document with a profound sense of dignity. A record on which Stein has found that exploring a more restrained side can yield work that is armed with experience and yet is all the lighter for it, where your attention isn’t demanded and yet is effortlessly claimed. Every sound, every choice, has earned its place. 

“I think making records is a really powerful way of letting go of experiences,” Stein notes. “I’m allowing myself to kiss things goodbye.” Through these converging chapters of her life, ‘The Weightless Hour’ feels like an arrival for Juanita Stein: “I’ve finally learned to be okay in space and be loud in my experiences.”