Ben Howard Releases 'Collections From The Whiteout'

Ben Howard is very excited to today release his new album Collections From The Whiteout, out now on Republic Records. Ben has also shared a video for the album's "Sorry Kid." The track is loosely inspired by the story of Anna Sorokin, the Russian born German woman who, after moving to New York City in 2013, posed as a billionaire heiress. She was eventually charged with multiple counts of grand larceny and in 2019 was imprisoned for 4-12 years. She was released earlier this year.

In celebration of the new record, Ben will be performing an exclusive one-off global live stream event. Filmed at the iconic Goonhilly Earth Station on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, UK, Ben and his band will perform new album tracks for the first time. This show marks the first band performance since the conclusion of a worldwide tour in January 2019, which culminated in a sold-out four night run at Brixton Academy. The film will be streamed as live on April 8 at 8pm locally including 8pm EST as well as 8pm PST. Tickets are available here.

Howard had always approached his albums with a clear idea of what they were going to be, be it the pastoral songwriting of Every Kingdom, his Brit award-winning 2011 debut, the electrified anguish of its chart-topping follow up, I Forget Where We Were, or the rich atmospherics of 2018's acclaimed Noonday Dream. The road to Howard's fourth album, however, was far more uncertain.

Two summers ago Howard was driving through Portugal listening to People Collective, the collaborative project spearheaded by Justin Vernon and The National's Aaron Dessner. As Howard crossed the river Tagus, the circular loops of 17-minute track Santa Agnes, written and recorded by the Dessner brothers, captivated him. It captured a moment he was keen not to forget and gave him an impetus to get back home and to work on a new record.

At this point Howard's fourth album was just a few fragments of ideas. He threw caution to the wind, contacted Dessner and the pair began a process of creative push and pull that would create the finest record of Howard's career. Collections From The Whiteout an album in which all the multiple facets and strands of Howard's talents have coalesced. His roots as a singer-songwriter in the vein of childhood hero John Martyn, the virtuoso guitar playing that adorned I Forget Where We Were's blood-letting and the love of electronic textures that turned that all on its head and inside out on Noonday Dream... it's all present here, but recalibrated to forge a new sound that is both impossible to pin down and unmistakably his.

Collections From The Whiteout was made in a state of near permanent transience as Howard flitted between New York, Devon, his home in Paris and back again to record with Dessner. For the last 18 months, however, he's been enjoying the stability of his new home in Ibiza. His parents are nearby, he and his father tend to the land around the house and down the road was where his grandfather, a former beau of the Velvet Underground's tragic chanteuse Nico, set up a jazz bar in the 1960s. It's from here that he put the finishing touches on the record, as he and Dessner exchanged final mixes online.

When Ben travelled alone to New York, it was with an open-mind and a head full of ideas. He was keen to delve more into the sphere of tape loops and FXs (still inspired by that drive through Portugal listening to Saint Agnes), and to putting his guitars through a "spaceship of pedal boards", but also to perhaps embrace the notion of collaboration that was so imperative to Dessner but perhaps less familiar to the Ben of old who relied on his trusted crew of familiar faces. Album credits include Yussef Dayes, one of the UK's most innovative young drummer/producer's, Kate Stables (This Is The Kit), James Krivchenia (Big Thief), Kyle Keegan (Hiss Golden Messenger), and Aaron lent his hand too where needed. Thomas Bartlett, St. Vincent's go-to pianist, and Rob Moose, a long-standing arranger of strings for Bon Iver and collaborator to Laura Marling, Blake Mills, and Phoebe Bridgers is also present, seasoning the mix accordingly. Long-term guitarist to Ben's band, Mickey Smith, remains a reassuring constant.

Whereas Howard's previous two records featured more than their fair share of personal soul-scraping, this time around he wanted to look outwards. Yet as we wrote, his own interior world crept in.

"I had a phase where it was going to be a concept record. I didn't feel like I had loads of stuff about myself that I wanted to write about so I was cherry picking bits of news feeds and little interesting stories," he recalls. "Then when you tinker with it, you try and fit words in, you stretch it and then all of a sudden your normal tics start feeding into it and songs end up being partly about yourself partly about someone else. It's sort of an amalgamation," he pauses, before adding with a laugh. "I wanted to write a concept record, but I got distracted."

"I feel comfortable at the moment in terms of finally understanding what I do. Before I was just exploring things and not understanding what I did as a songwriter and not having any composure with it," he reflects. "Now I feel more confident of being able to run with ideas. I feel quite happy to explore weird ideas. If I want to write a song about a body that's found in the river, then that's alright. I can write songs and not be too precious and kill the muse early on."

Far from it. Collections From The Whiteout shows that Ben Howard's muse has never been in finer fettle.

Listen here:

Photo Credit: Roddy Bow

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