Low’s Alan Sparhawk will release an album under his own name—and his first full-length since the death, in 2022, of his wife and bandmate Mimi Parker—this fall, according to a profile in The New Yorker. The record is set to be titled White Roses, My God. Sparhawk said it would draw on experiments with improvised guitar, pitch-shifted vocals, and a preset synthesizer clocked to a drum machine. “I was messing with this rigid stuff,” he told interviewer Justin Taylor. “There were moments where it would quickly become very visceral, very spontaneous. You’ve created the structure for it to happen and come through you, but you’re trusting the universe about what is going to come in.”
Since Parker’s death of ovarian cancer, Sparhawk has been performing, and occasionally recording, in Derecho Rhythm Section, a band featuring his and Parker’s son, Cyrus Sparhawk, on bass and some songwriting duties. (Their output, to date, is collected on Bandcamp.) Details on personnel and other arrangements for White Roses, My God remain under wraps.
Sharon Van Etten, Perfume Genius, and Phoebe Bridgers paid tribute Low in secondary quotes throughout the interview. Etten said, of Low’s music, “I could feel their love and their pain.”
Perfume Genius’ Michael Hadreas observed the band’s “hymnal quality,” adding, “There was a warmth to it. But it was also really fucked up. The music is kind of fucked. And dark. That’s comforting to me, that those all exist at the same time.”
Bridgers acknowledged being influenced by Low’s “sparsity, letting people fill in the gaps, to feel something that isn’t directly handed to them.” That Parker performed while heavily pregnant, she added, positioned her as a role model. “That rocks to me,” Bridgers said. “That image really sticks in my mind.”
Read the full profile, titled “The Heart of Low,” at The New Yorker.
