Now, Lavers is back with his sophomore album, surprisingly, also titled Your Day Will Come. It arrives June 26 via Jagjaguwar. Reusing the same title isn’t about revisiting the past, but about extending an idea that still resonates with him, a push and pull between confidence and uncertainty. The new record sees the return of close collaborators, including violinist Zachary Paul and singer Maya McGrory, both of whom appeared on the first album. At the same time, the circle widens with contributions from More Eaze, Anastasia Coope, Tchad Cousins of Urika’s Bedroom, Bella Litsa, and Isaac Eiger. It also includes “The Coward Forgets His Nightmare,” a track that already hinted at the direction of this new chapter.

Leading the announcement is the new single “Song For The Messenger,” paired with a stark, grayscale video, directed and edited by Robbie Barnett. The track leans into Lavers’s signature style, blending pitched-up vocals with loose, emotionally charged instrumentation of live drums, drifting strings, and warped guitar tones. There’s a tension running through it, but also a quiet sense of resolve. “This song is laughing at me,” Lavers shared. “It’s like looking over your shoulder and walking off a cliff. The video is about having no fear.” Watch and support below.

For the past couple of years, Anastasia Coope has been on our radar. Ever since we premiered her debut track “Norma Ray” back in 2021, this Hudson Valley native has consistently intrigued us with her unique brand of spectral and surreal freak folk. “He Is On His Way Home, We Don’t Live Together,” the first single from her upcoming debut album, may be her strangest offering yet. With its spaced-out choral elements and ominous layers, the delightfully disorienting track transforms a quite simple romantic text into an eerie and psychedelic sonic experience.

Anastasia Coope is a painting student at the Pratt Institute in New York, and it’s clear she has a deeply conceptual approach to her art. She places her music in the legacy of Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism – an artistic approach predicated on accessing the subconscious through surprising juxtaposition. This makes for a strange, intricate, creative sound. At its core, Coope’s music is lovely home-recorded folk – something like the early recordings of Weyes Blood and Jessica Pratt – but its elevated through otherworldly vocal harmonies and dense sound collage. Strange, atmospheric elements dance at the edges of her music, and her many vocal layers resonate against each other in a beautiful river of harmony.

On her debut single, the excellent “Norma Ray,” which we came out last month, Coope uses sound collage to smear together abrupt, blaring juxtapositions. On the new single “Mattered and Sworn,” the different collage elements seem more comfortable around one another, sitting in more obvious, agreeable synergy. This doesn’t lessen the surealness of the track, but it directs that surrealism towards a less disruptive, more whimsical place.

All of the song’s elements are captured with a wonderful lofi aesthetic – not the crunch and crackle of bedroom lofi producers, more the sound of an old field recorder, like a dusty audio clip you might find deep in a library database. The vocal is all compressed mouth pops and clipped eses, the saxophone is warm, wood-gain air and amber, the guitar is a long lost creek-side Sunday. It’s all reminiscent of the excellent The Lemon of Pink by The Books. It evokes a half forgotten dream of tree roots and dappled sunlight – a piece of the subconscious accessible only through brilliant surreal art.

A few weeks ago, we had the honor of premiering Anastasia Coope’s impressive debut track “Norma Ray,” an intricate folk track that we called “a deliciously dense piece of psychedelia.” Today, the New York based singer-songwriter has unveiled the accompanying visuals, that were shot and directed with Anna Brief in the Hudson Valley in the Fall of 2020. Inspired by Buñuel, a master of the surrealist movement, the video features, amongst others, snippets of Coope running with mischievous abandon around a wooded area’s small pond as well as extinct animals from the 1955 sci-fi movie Journey to the Beginning of Time, directed by Karel Zeman. Well, just like with the song, there’s a lot going on in this DIY clip, which was made “simply for fun,” as she explained. Watch the video, support via Bandcamp and listen to the artist explain the concept of her track below.

New York based singer-songwriter Anastasia Coope debuts today “Norma Ray,” a surreal psychedelic folk song “that imagines what the Manson Family women singing with Sung Tongs era Animal Collective might sound like.”

Coope, a painting student at the Pratt Institute in New York City, began taking music more seriously last summer during the COVID shutdown. Starting with GarageBand and her mom’s old Martin, she started writing the songs that will form her debut EP, to be released later this year. “Norma Ray” doesn’t use much more than these instruments – a bit of SP-404 to effect the vocals, a touch of Omnichord and a Moog bass drone. Yet, despite the simplicity of its instrumental elements, the song is a deliciously dense piece of psychedelia. You can hear some of her painter’s sensibility in the way she builds out the song – textured vocals layer on top of one another like overlapping brush strokes, and pile up into a thick canvas of sound.

“Norma Ray” is a song that rewards relistening – patiently the layers of the song peal away from one another and reveal their individual, otherworldly oddities. Anastasia Coope has a deeply surrealist appreciation of unexpected juxtaposition – strange, evocative pairings of sound leap out from the stereo. There is something powerfully abrupt in some of her yelps and howls. The listener finds themselves a bit flummoxed, caught between stair steps. It is rare that music is so genuinely surprising.

However, beneath these odd, complicated knots, “Norma Ray” has a lovely folk sensibility. Coope is originally from upstate New York, and the down-home acoustic guitar tone at the heart of the song sounds like the fields and farms of that part of the world. With this warmth at its core, the song;s strange, fantastical vocal harmonies start to take on an unlikely beauty, like the best moments of Animal Collective’s discography, or my favorite surreal paintings.

Below, watch Anastasia Coope give more insights about her debut track “Norma Ray”.