Bat for Lashes Returns With New Album The Dream of Delphi, Shares Song and Video: Watch

Bat for Lashes has announced a new album, The Dream of Delphi, her first for new label home Mercury KX. Ahead of its May 31 release, you can check out a video for the title track below, along with the album art and tracklist. An accompanying film, also called The Dream of Delphi, is on the way too.

The album is a folkloric account of Natasha Khan’s early motherhood, partly told through a character called the Motherwitch, according to a press release. Of the single, Khan adds:

This is the manifesto of the album. It’s like a spell being cast. It’s the conjuring, the manifestation, the drawing-down of Delphi from the ether. This is me calling on her soul. It’s about going up into the stars and down into the underworld simultaneously,  how celestials and deep guttural sounds can come together, how that reflects the journey I went on. It’s about what happens when you’re stretched physically, mentally, even vaginally! I think it’s just humbled me, too, becoming a mother. It’s  made me feel more vulnerable than I’ve ever felt before. But I feel more human, more embodied. I can’t escape life by making beautiful things as much as I did. But there’s sort of a beauty to my mortality now.

Khan made the video in the English countryside with creative director and choreographer Alexandra Green and director Freddie Leyden. Her last studio album was 2019’s Lost Girls; since then, she has released a lockdown-era live album and explored the Motherwitch character through an oracle deck of the same name.

The Dream of Delphi:

01 The Dream of Delphi
02 Christmas Day
03 Letter to My Daughter
04 At Your Feet
05 The Midwives Have Left
06 Home
07 Breaking Up
08 Delphi Dancing
09 Her First Morning
10 Waking Up
11 The Dream of Delphi (Bonus Extended Strings Version)