We are very honoured to premiere the first video off the surprise new album ‘Intimate Hinterland’ to be announced tomorrow by the Sydney indie supergroup The Aerial Maps and set for release on Friday.
The members of The Aerial Maps reads like a who’s who of the Sydney indie scene. Originally formed with the late legendary Simon Homes of the iconic The Hummingbirds, members are currently Adam Gibson (Modern Giant, The Ark-Ark Birds), Simon Gibson (Disneyfist, Sneeze, Modern Giant), Peter Fenton (Crow), Alannah Russack (The Hummingbirds), Mark ‘Na Na’ Hyland (Disneyfist, Handsome Young Strangers, and many more) and drummer Jasper Fenton (Decoder Ring, The Laurels).
With this sort of gold standard membership, the announcement of a new album – their third – is exhilarating, and the video we are exclusively premiering today is a glorious, affirmative piece of music that will bring a tear to the eye and a lump to the throat.
‘We All Need To Know There’s Someone Out There In The Night’ is at heart a gospel song holding out a beacon of light in the most dire of times, expressing solidarity for those locked in isolation and despair. The Australian vernacular and the melancholy infused in the part spoken storytelling is cinematic, bold and achingly beautiful with its layers of harmonies in the anthemic chorus. This is a song to link arms with your fellow human beings and pets, to hold up a light in the night sky and to immerse yourself in the glorious power of the track. The distant buzz of cicadas and the sounds of the Australian outback give a certain force: an antipodean flavour that lasts and lingers.
The result is something that has an immeasurable stature – reflecting the unique Australianism of The Triffids and The Go-Betweens mixed in with the powerful classicism of Tindersticks and Spiritualized with the euphoria created by the fire and the fury of a southern baptist gospel choir.
The video is a simple montage of outdoor freedoms interspersed with the band performing on ukuleles, with powerful messages of solidarity and compassion. The mental impact of COVID, the attendant lockdowns and increasing sense of isolation is well documented, and The Aerial Maps have created a warming prescription-free panacea filled with love and compassion.
‘Intimate Hinterland’ will be released this Friday, 22 October 2021. Gibson says of the album that there’s a uniting theme that binds these songs together, the conveyance of a plethora of thoughts, emotions and hopes for the future via evocative landscapes of people, places, sounds and moments – the minutiae of everyday objects and the weight those things can carry:
I wanted this one to have a sense of timelessness, in a way, not mired in nostalgia but having a tinge of memory amid a sense of wanting also to push forward whilst also incorporating those ghosts of the past’ within everything.
This will be something to look forward to.
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