Okkervil River Announce New Album & Tour

Okkervil River have announced their first record since 2013's The Silver Gymnasium. Will Sheff, in between tours and albums, wrote, directed, produced, and crowd-funded "Down Down The Deep River," a companion film to that album. The band also reissued an EP for Record Store Day in 2015, and their seminal record Black Sheep Boy, commemorating its ten year anniversary. Of Away, Sheff writes:

The new Okkervil River album is called Away. I didn’t plan to make it and initially wasn’t sure if it was going to be an Okkervil River album or if I’d ever put it out. I wrote the songs during a confusing time of transition in my personal and professional life and recorded them quickly with a brand new group of musicians. I got together the best New York players I could think of, people whose playing and personalities I was fans of and who came more out of a jazz or avant garde background, and we cut the songs live in one or two takes – trying to keep things as natural and immediate as possible – over three days in a studio on Long Island that hosts the Neve 8068 console which recorded Steely Dan’s Aja and John Lennon’s Double Fantasy. I asked Marissa Nadler to sing on it and got the composer Nathan Thatcher to write some beautiful or- chestral arrangements, we recorded them with the classical ensemble yMusic and then I mixed the record with Jonathan Wilson out in Los Angeles.

2013-2015 had been a strange time for me. I lost some connections in a music industry that was visibly falling apart. Some members of the Okkervil River backing band left, moving on to family life or to their own projects. I spent a good deal of time sitting in hospice with my grandfather, who was my idol, while he died. I felt like I didn’t know where I belonged. When there was trouble at home, a friend offered me her empty house in the Catskills where I could go and clear my head. New songs were coming fast up there, so I set myself the challenge of trying to write as many as possible as quickly as possible. I wasn’t think about any kind of end product; the idea was just to write through what I was feeling, quickly and directly. Eventually, I realized I was writ- ing a death story for a part of my life that had, buried inside of it, a path I could follow that might let me go somewhere new.

The album is available for pre-ordered via ATO Records here, and see tour dates below:

Okkervil River:

06-30 Austin, TX - Stubb’s Bar-B-Q %
07-01 Dallas, TX - The Bomb Factory %
07-02 Houston, TX - White Oak Music Hall %
07-03 San Antonio, TX - Aztec Theater in San Antonio %
07-14 Portland, ME - Port City Music Hall
07-15 Portsmouth, NH - 3S Artspace
07-16 Hudson, NY - Club Helsinki
07-17 Burlington, VT - Higher Ground
07-20 Brooklyn, NY - National Sawdust
09-14 Cambridge, MA - The Sinclair *
09-15 Cambridge, MA - The Sinclair *
09-16 Montreal, QC - Theatre Fairmount
09-19 Washington, DC - 9:30 Club *
09-20 Carrboro, NC - Cat’s Cradle *
09-21 Atlanta, GA - Terminal West at King Plow Arts Center *
09-23 Memphis, TN - 1884 Lounge *
09-24 New Orleans, LA - One Eyed Jacks *
09-30 Phoenix, AZ - The Crescent Ballroom *
10-01 Solana Beach, CA - Belly Up Tavern *
10-04 Los Angeles, CA - Teragram Ballroom
10-05 San Francisco, CA - The Independent
10-07 Portland, OR - Wonder Ballroom *
10-08 Seattle, WA - Neptune Theatre *
10-10 Salt Lake City, UT - Urban Lounge *
10-11 Denver, CO - Bluebird Theater *
10-13 Minneapolis, MN - Fine Line Music Café *
10-14 Chicago, IL - Metro #
10-15 Ferndale, MI - The Magic Bag ^
10-16 Millvale, PA - Mr. Small’s Theatre ^
10-18 Philadelphia, PA - Union Transfer ^
10-30 Oslo, Norway - Parkteatret
10-31 Gothenburg, Sweden - Pustervik
11-02 Stockholm, Sweden - Debaser Strand
11-03 Copenhagen, Denmark - Vega
11-04 Weissenhauser Strand, Germany - Rolling Stone Weekender
11-05 Amsterdam, Holland - Paradiso Nord
11-07 Paris, France - Petit Bain
11-08 Brussels, Belgium - Botanique Rotonde
11-10 London, England - Islington Assembly Hall
11-11 Bristol, England - Thekla
11-12 Manchester, England - Gorilla
11-13 Glasgow, Scotland - Stereo