After sharing the mini-album Weft in January, Blue Lake’s Jason Dungan has announced his next studio LP. Out October 3 via Tonal Union, The Animal is the Copenhagen-based musician’s proper follow-up to to 2023’s Sun Arcs and his first project recorded with a full band in a studio. The album was produced by Dungan and Aske Zidore and mixed by War on Drugs collaborator Jeff Zeigler. Listen to lead single “Cut Paper” below.
“I’m quite fascinated in thinking about humans more as part of the animal environment and not as something that’s so separated into a ‘human’ realm, or sitting on top of a hierarchical pyramid,” Dungan said of his new album’s title in a press statement. “So the Animal is also me, or us—that we are just living, existing, in the same way as a piece of moss or a sparrow or a cow.”
Dungan continued: “I don’t think it’s possible now to think about nature as a pure or isolated thing. Being around animals in this setting, I think about how they communicate with each other, forge relationships, and navigate the city, but all without language. It’s not an experience of nature which is bucolic and uncomplicated—it’s an experience of nature and the animal world which is bound up in human activity.”
Read about Sun Arcs at No. 46 in “The 50 Best Albums of 2023.”
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The Animal:
01 Circles
02 Cut Paper
03 Berlin
04 Flowers for David
05 Seeds
06 Yarrow
07 Strand
08 The Animal
09 Vertical Hold
10 To Read