NJ's Armor For Sleep were staples of the early 2000s emo boom, having released two beloved LPs on Equal Vision before moving to a major for one last album and EP and then breaking up in 2009. They did some reunion shows over the years, and now they've announced a new album for the first time in 15 years, The Rain Museum, due September 9 via their original label Equal Vision (pre-order). Lead singer Ben Jorgensen gives the following background on the album:
Back in 2020, at the start of the pandemic and at the start of our collective lockdown, I made it my mission to finish writing a concept album that I had the idea for for many years but was never able to bring to life. The Rain Museum was initially a short story I wrote many years ago about a post-apocalyptic Earth and a mysterious museum in the middle of the desert. Weaving the story into an album was going to be my quarantine project. Unfortunately, my marriage of nearly eight years and basically my entire life fell apart as I was beginning the writing process. The one thing I had in my life to divert my attention from what I was going through was the creative process of writing that album… so I decided to push through and keep working on the record…but something weird happened. Because I couldn’t ignore what I was going through personally, I wound up writing myself and what I was going through into the story of the album and into the world I had been creating for this concept record. In the end, it’s an album about facing some of the most painful parts of being human and how lost we can get. I just hope it will speak to people going through their own dark times, as my favorite art certainly helped me get through mine.