The innocence mission is releasing ‘Midwinter Swimmers,’ the second single, video and title track from their first studio album from the innocence mission in four years. The album sounds immediately like an old friend. At the same time, it’s a new kind of adventure for the beloved Pennsylvania band of high school friends Karen Peris, Don Peris, and Mike Bitts, having both an expansive, cinematic quality and the strange, lo-fi beauty of a newly discovered vintage folk/pop album, brimming with melody. Midwinter Swimmers is being released November 29 by Therese Records in North America, Bella Union in the U.K. and PVine in Japan.
Watch the video here:
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‘Midwinter Swimmers’ is the second in a trio of songs on the new album (the second being the title song) about missing a loved one who is away, and of how love can transcend distance, Karen says. Piano melodies and high electric with strummed nylon string guitars make a glimmery soundtrack for this tune. Karen Peris thinks of this as ‘a small song of looking ahead to the arrival of a loved and dear person.’ In part of the landscape, swimmers are seen from a distance and are refracted through tears and made more beautiful that way. The contrast of swimmers in the winter is connected with early flowers that, though fragile in appearance are especially hardy, enough to appear when it is still snowing. And this connection in turn becomes linked with the bravery of the person who has been away and will soon return.
This attentiveness to small detail typifies the way the innocence mission’s songs look closely at everyday moments as miraculous worlds of their own. Karen’s words stand on their own as poetry, with a particular sense of place and color, of the visual, that communicate universal experiences of change and loss, and of love, hope, and gratitude.
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Aural Aggravation 