Laura Marling announces new album ‘Patterns In Repeat’
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(Credits: Tamsin Topolski)
Four time Mercury Prize-nominee Laura Marling has returned with her new single, ‘Patterns’. The track is the first taste of her forthcoming album, Patterns In Repeat.
Marling’s upcoming LP is set for release on October 25th via Chrysalis/Partisan Records, which marks her first full-length solo studio effort since Song for Our Daughter in 2020. However, despite not sharing any new material during this time, Marling has remained incredibly busy.
In 2021, her side project with Mike Lindsay, LUMP, released their second album, Animal, and Marling also became a mother for the first time in 2023, which has helped shape Patterns In Repeat. Since becoming a mother, Marling has reflected on the patterns which cultivate to create family life, which was sparked by giving birth to her daughter.
In a statement, Marling explained how she expected motherhood to put her career to a temporary halt, which thankfully, didn’t prove to be the case. “Over the course of nine months, I had happily prepared myself for the fact that my life as a songwriter would be put on hold while I adjusted to life as a new parent. How delighted then was I to discover that for the first few months of a baby’s life, you can bounce them in a bouncer and play guitar all day. For the first time in my life, I was able to gaze into another human’s eyes as I wrote,” she shared.
Becoming a parent is a life-altering experience, which understandably plays a prominent role in the narrative across the record, as Marling notes, “Of course, new parents feel like they discovered that feeling – one of the very finest that life has to offer, of looking into the eyes of your child and feeling the enormity of the picture as a whole, the enormity of a precarious life, celestial, fragile and extraordinary, taking its place among the comparatively banal constellation of a family.”
In addition to focusing exclusively on becoming a mother, the birth of her child made Marling consider the “banal constellation” of family life and “the drama of the domestic sphere”, including reflecting on her own childhood. The singer-songwriter tackles “the frail threads that bind a family together, the good intentions we hold onto for our progeny and the many and various ways they get lost in time. So much complexity in the banal, the caged, the everyday.”
Marling also said that every record in her career “has served as a time-stamped chapter of my life” with Patterns In Repeat finding her with an “entirely new and enormous perspective surrounding me.”
While an extensive tour hasn’t been announced, Marling is set to showcase Patterns In Repeat with residencies at London’s Hackney Church and the Bowery Ballroom in New York.
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