The Innocence Mission (lower case) has announced the release of their new album “Midwinter Swimmers” on 29th November 2024 via Bella Union. The first studio album from the innocence mission in four years, “Midwinter Swimmers” sounds familiar while being a new kind of adventure for the Pennsylvania band of high school friends Karen Peris, Don Peris, and Mike Bitts. It is described as having both an expansive, cinematic quality and the strange, lo-fi beauty of a newly discovered vintage folk album.
Throughout the album, there is a palpable emotion inherent in Karen Peris’ voice, and in the distinctive combination of her low (baritone and nylon string), rhythmic guitar and piano playing with Don Peris’ luminous, high electric guitar lines. Bitts, their longtime friend, adds a further dimension of upright and electric bass. “There is a companionship about Karen’s voice,” Don Peris says, “and a realistic joy and gratitude, in the midst of life’s difficulties, that she is expressing here on songs like ‘Sisters and Brothers’. I feel bolstered and comforted by them”. You can pre-order “Midnight Swimmers” here.
The band has shared a video for lead single ‘This Thread Is a Green Street’ which features the beautiful and distinctive hand-drawn animation of vocalist Karen Peris.
‘This Thread Is a Green Street’ has been said to be a perfect entrance into the innocence mission’s sound and sensibility. Karen Peris describes it as “a sort of envisioning the landscape as a world of doorways, that might allow us to locate memory or to be nearer in some way to people we miss. And the transportive quality of scenes we might come upon in the natural world, or even in everyday objects – a sewing thread when I’m mending something could remind me of a street map. One of the things about recording it was, how to find this feeling inside the sound, and how to find the half-remembered beauty of sing-alongs of our 1970’s childhoods. There’s a search in recording that goes on being elusive, in a good way.”
