40 Watt Sun have today released the second single to be taken from their upcoming new album, Little Weight. Astoria follows the first single, Closer to Lifewhich was released in July; both tracks are streaming everywhere now. Little Weight is the follow up to 2022’s Perfect Light and sees Patrick Walker take a different approach to writing and recording. The album will be released on Patrick’s own label, Fisher’s Folly on September 6, 2024.
The initial writing for Little Weight took place on a solitary trip to Cornwall – the first of three planned trips to focus on the creation of the album. On the writing of Astoria, Patrick commented:
“I was maybe 4 days into my stay in Cornwall. I had been lying awake since 3am, and at about 5am, I finally got up, went downstairs, and made a drink. I sat down, retuned my guitar to something new, and played these three chords. The vocal melody and the lyrics to the first verse were improvised in the moment.
“When we rehearsed it as a band, I told Roland I had in mind something like Pino Palladino, or some of what John Giblin did on John Martyn’s Grace and Danger,or Tony Levin’s playing on Joan Armatrading’s The Weakness in Me. So we listened to some of these records and then he wrote that bass part. He recorded it on a fretless.
“Broadly, it’s a song about a time I was staying in Queens, NY, and one night in Brooklyn when I stood looking out over the East River.”
The three writing retreats – first to Cornwall, then to Gottland, Sweden and, finally to the Peak District – were designed to simplify the record-making process and recapture more of the rawness and spontaneity of the band’s earliest recordings. Whilst Perfect Light was written and recorded over a long time period, with a wide cast of musicians, Patrick was determined to take a different approach with Little Weight.
The pre-planned series of trips provided the space and opportunities to focus, within which Walker and his collaborators – drummer Andrew Prestidge and bassist Roland Scriver – were able to do their best work. Designated time to work without distraction allowed them absolute freedom to create, whilst deadlines added to the urgency of the final recordings captured at Holy Mountain Studios in London in December 2023. Engineering and mixing was undertaken by Chris Fullard (Sunn O))); IDLES; Ulver), who was assisted by Stanley Gravett, before Adam Gonsalves mastered the tracks in Portland, Oregon. The album’s cover art is by Tekla Vály.
Whilst he remains unwilling to be drawn to discussing the specifics of his songs, 40 Watt Sun has once again produced a collection of vignettes that are steeped in poetic beauty, longing, love, and melancholy nostalgia.