Miserable chillers - Innocent victims (2026) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. Telling the bees
02. Bikeman
03. Song for ivy
04. The crater
05. The big guitar
06. Miller
07. Tybee
08. Dumb kingdom
09. Last lights
10. Amadeus
11. Book of memory
12. Quince tree
13. Hoping for snow

When the sudden, unexpected death of a loved one turned my life inside out, the everyday became weird and changed. I would cry in the shower after crying in my sleep. I detected cruelty in the way ice accumulated on the shore of the Hudson River. I empathized with the ivy growing up the outer wall of my neighbor’s building. It pissed me off that I hadn’t met an angel in real life. Staring at a sandwich, I found myself moved by the image of whoever made the sandwich making the sandwich.

That sensation faded over time and the everyday came to feel everyday again, but it's hard to forget how easily and quickly estranged from our routines we can become. While writing this album, I often had an image in my head of a glass of milk with a drop of bright red blood floating on the surface. The white homogeneity of the milk seems irreparably lost, until the blood is gradually incorporated and it looks like it did before, imperceptibly darker.

The album is named after a hideous statue of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed that was on display at Harrods and was commissioned by Dodi's father, Mohamed Al-Fayed. In it, the two are running through waves while releasing an albatross from their hands. I became fixated on it in the depths of my own grief. It is a desperate attempt to contain within our meager methods of sense-making the enormity of loss. Accident will always elude explanation because it allows us to imagine that things could have been different. The gulf between knowing this and feeling it is painful.

While writing these songs, I listened to and drew from Caetano Veloso, Paul Simon, Franco Battiato, Burt Bacharach, and Judee Sill. As a songwriter and as a listener, above anything else, I’ve always been drawn to the way that the constituent elements of a song can give shape to feelings that retreat from us or are disfigured when we try to name them. Songs don’t have to explain. It is enough that this is how they go, until the next one and the one after that.