Our promised big news at last: we’ve signed to Seattle’s Sub Pop records. We’re proud to be joining their excellent roster, and excited about the new album we start recording in a few short weeks.

To celebrate, we’re releasing a couple of new items on our bandcamp page:

The first is a set of live recordings from the Island Arc performance in January , where we played Palo Santo, Rook, and The Golden Archipelago back-to-back. You can actually hear us blow a breaker at the end of “Hail, Mary”.

The second, Why I Love My Home (songs for Charles Burchfield) is a pair of long, experimental songs written and performed by JM for the Whitney Museum’s exhibit of Burchfield’s art. These are studio versions of the songs, recorded by Danny Reisch, who’ll be working with us on our new full-length. These songs will be pressed on beautiful 12″ vinyl next year as part of Graveface Records’ subscription-only charity singles compilation.

We’ve also been busy outside Shearwater – Thor’s been touring with Michael Gira’s reformed Swans, and is about to release a new instrumental album, Coy/Thor, and a thick book of terrifying/hilarious drawings, A Post-Apocalyptic Tale of Friendship, on Austin’s Monofonus Press. Kimberly’s new play, “Miss Tibet”, will be read at Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco on May 16th and 17th. And JM’s been guest-starring, playing piano and wurlitzer on Bill Callahan’s new Apocalypse and lending some vocals to Okkervil River’s I Am Very Far.

We may not be touring as a band before early 2012, when the new album’s set to drop, but we expect we’ll be going just about everywhere after that.

xo

SW