While Okkervil River released a career-spanning live album last year, they haven't put out new music since 2018. That's now changed with the release of a new song, "In A Light." It was recorded during the same sessions that produced the band's last album, In The Rainbow Rain, and starts out as a piano-based ballad, picking up twangy instrumentation and ending with a funky, extended jam. Stream it below.
In addition to "In A Light," Okkervil River have a second new track, "It Hasn’t Happened Yet," due out on Friday (5/14). About both songs, frontman Will Sheff says, "I wrote ‘In a Light’ with our guitarist Will Graefe right before I moved out of Brooklyn. We recorded it in one take at Figure 8 studios, with Frank LoCrasto adding piano and Ryan Dugre on second guitar. It sounded great instantly, but it didn't seem like the right moment to release the track, and the track didn't seem to be quite at home on In the Rainbow Rain. So I kept it under my hat. I'd had ‘It Hasn't Happened Yet’ kicking around as well, and I'd always wanted to release that one on its own but I could never get the recording to sit quite right. Finally I had a tandem eureka moment with both of them - I figured out what I needed to do to fix ‘It Hasn't Happened Yet’ and I felt the time was right for ‘In a Light.’ So I brushed them off and sent them to Dave Cerminara to mix. The whole process was incredibly smooth and easy. I think of these songs as two sides of the same coin, supporting each other by saying two different but complementary things. And even though I started them a couple years in the past they both seem to want to talk about the present and future."