Dispatch Release Eighth Studio Album 'Break Our Fall'

Celebrated roots rock band Dispatch have released their highly anticipated 8th studio album, Break Our Fall, on Bomber Records/AWAL Recordings. Listen below. Founding member Chadwick Stokes recently stopped by Mass Audubon's Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary to film a socially distant session with WGBH / Front Row Live. PRESS HERE to watch! Dispatch will be taking the songs from Break Our Fall on the road later this year and a big tour announcement is coming next week. Stay tuned for more information!

The songs on Break Our Fall speak not only to Chadwick Stokes' and Brad Corrigan's personal evolution, but to human nature itself, charting a course from denial and resistance to growth and acceptance through deep introspection and empathetic character studies. For Stokes and Corrigan, the only constant these past few years has been change: marriage, birth, death, departure. Add to that an exceedingly tense political climate, long-overdue reckonings on racial justice/gender equality, and a runaway global pandemic, and you've got Break Our Fall, an album that enriches Dispatch's distinguished legacy, on which the depth and breadth of the band's stunning songwriting is displayed in full force.

The music on Break Our Fall is pure Dispatch - blending infectious roots rock with hints of reggae, folk, and blues. The production is similarly lean and energetic, leaving plenty of space for some of the group's most pointed, political lyrics to date. Working with frequent collaborators Mike Sawitzke (Eels) and John Dragonetti (The Submarines) to craft a wide-ranging collection of cathartic songs, the result is a timely and essential album from a band still breaking new ground two-and-a-half decades into its storied career, an ode to resilience and survival that manages to find hope and joy on even the darkest of days.

The album works its way through a litany of modern fears and frustration on the driving "May We All" and laments the direction of the country in no uncertain terms on the simmering "All This Time" (featuring soulful vocal contributions from The White Buffalo). Reality sets in with the heartache of missed opportunities and lost loved ones coming into sharp focus on songs like the bittersweet "As Old As I" and epic "Connie Hawkins," which tips its cap to everything from Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen to The Cars and Violent Femmes. By the time fans push play on the soaring title track, a change is in the air, and grief and helplessness begin to give way to hope and determination. The pendulum swings back towards optimism with the stream of consciousness "Elevator Operator" and waltzing "Born On Earth" making peace with what lies beyond our control and the dreamy "Stoned Enough" finds transcendence in human connection while ecstatic closer "Pour Into You" recognizes that, despite all our brokenness, love remains, and always will.

Making sense of our often-incomprehensible world has been at the core of Dispatch's mission since the very start, when Chadwick Stokes and Brad Corrigan were still just students at Middlebury College in Vermont. Over the course of a slew of acclaimed studio and live albums and countless tours and festivals, the band would go on to become one of biggest success stories in independent music history, selling out three nights at Madison Square Garden and drawing over 100,000 fans to a massive outdoor show in their adopted hometown of Boston without any traditional radio or major label support. Rolling Stone called the group "roots-rock heroes," while Billboard praised their "seamless harmonies, ragged edges and breezy attitude," and SPIN hailed the band's "remarkable renaissance." Throughout their rise, Stokes and Corrigan took every opportunity to use their success for good, launching charitable organizations to fight poverty and mass incarceration, raising funds and awareness for environmental causes on the road, and even traveling as far afield as Nicaragua and Zimbabwe to work with children and communities in need.

Listen here:

Photo Credit: Matt Catalano

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