Damien Jurado to release his new album What's New, Tomboy

Artist and songwriter Damien Jurado will release his new album What’s New, Tomboy? on May 1st via Loose. What’s New, Tomboy? is Jurado’s 15th studio album and like its predecessors self-produced. Birds Tricked into the Trees is the first single of the album and is out now.

Throughout his 25-year career, Damien Jurado has been chasing the ghosts of the words in his songs. He rummaged restlessly between fiction and reality. He disappeared into disembodied dreamscapes and received resplendent visions. He returned to earthbound plains estranged by a world gone more cold and callous. He sifted through fogs of the past for unblemished truths. And throughout these myriad avenues and trials, Jurado came out none the wiser. It’s the damnedest thing when you think about it: a man who can paint such intricate scenes with each line leaving his lips, still sounding completely lost. The architect of his own unsolvable puzzle.

When You Were Few, for example, was written as Jurado was clearing out the bulk of his possessions. “I got rid of almost everything I owned,” he reveals. “It was almost like I had died, honestly. You know that feeling when someone dies and you have to clear out their apartment or their house? That’s what I did. It was as if I had died, even though I was still living. I donated five of my guitars to a thrift shop.”

Jurado’s decision to chisel away all of the materialistic things extends not only to the clarity of the words, but to the album’s production values, as well. Devoid of reverb and extensive tracking, this collection of songs is of the cut-and-dry, plainspoken variety, drawing influence from records such as Lou Reed’s The Bells, Wire’s Chairs Missing and Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure. Jurado: “I left out certain instruments on purpose, so you’re making space for the listener to fill in their own melodies and parts.”

Where last year’s In the Shape of a Storm stripped everything to reveal an artist at his most intimate, What’s New, Tomboy? sees Jurado stepping back into a more fleshed out sound with his voice and rhythm section at the fore. What’s New, Tomboy? is an album that seeks respite in bare minimums and barren revelations: sometimes frail, sometimes affirming, sometimes wry, and usually a threadbare mix of all those sentiments.

Damien Jurado will return to Belgium on July 15th when he’ll be the special guest of Het Zesde Metaal at OLT Rivierenhof Antwerp.