LAND OF TALK Announces New LP LASTS via Saddle Creek
The Montreal-based project shares the lead single "4:44" ahead of the album release.
Land of Talk–the Montreal-based project of Lizzie Powell–announced that their sixth album, LASTS, will be released on November 13, 2026, via Saddle Creek. They've also shared lead single '4:44,' a serpentine, summery earworm led by Powell's inimitable vocals and chiming guitar. Written and produced by Powell, and recorded with trusted collaborators Michael Feuerstack (bass, pedal steel, additional vocals, engineering & mixing) and Michael Belyea (drums, percussion) in a cabin in rural Harrington, Quebec, LASTS is now available for preorder.
''4:44,' originally titled 'Harmonic Nation,' was one of the first songs we recorded at the cabin. It felt so good to finally be playing live in a cozy space with good pals in the dead of an especially lonely winter. Melodically, I don't remember where the track came from, it just appeared fully formed despite my best efforts to doubt it, shape it, or abandon it altogether. If I got carried away and wanted the song to go on forever I don't blame myself,' Powell explains of the song, out now alongside a video directed by Ana-Maria Espino Trudel. 'Lyrically, '4:44' formed much later and mostly was improvised in the studio. I had recently read online some demonstrably false things about my personal (and professional) life written by someone who I thought knew me. Whether they changed the facts out of sheer ignorance or in an effort to protect my privacy is unknown. The experience reminded me how I've come to accept the false narratives and (essentially) myths surrounding Land of Talk for years. For a while, I was questioning if I even knew my own story; my own lived experience. As for the title, there's a story, but that will stay private :).'
Land of Talk is still here–that wasn't always a guarantee. Over the multi-faceted twenty year history of their project, Powell has drifted from and back to music, always interrogating their role as an artist. In the time since 2023's Performances, they found themselves utterly worn down by the vicissitudes of the music industry and wracked with worry around their aging parents. Yet the music didn't stop: Powell heard songs in traffic and in birds chirping, in their downstairs neighbor's daily prayers and in the babble of children on the street. Melodies slowly cohered over time. 'Life can become so unbearable, and music is where I go to metabolize it,' they explain. 'I know the music was the only thing that was going to help me.' Soon Powell reemerged with LASTS.
LASTS is full of double meanings–both resilience and finality, acting as a noun and a verb. Though the album is haunted by crises including climate collapse, political upheaval, and genocide, the magnitude of global turmoil led Powell towards smaller, humane depictions of suffering and grief. As both their parents became ill, Powell reflected on the last time a person might walk, might talk to a loved one. Yet watching their parents near the other side of life's arc also made Powell consider all they had survived across their own decades on this earth, their new songs channeling both gratitude and rage. LASTS became a phrase, honoring Land of Talk's circuitous route and all Powell's reckoned with through the years. 'I think of this record as a love letter to life,' they say.
For Powell, songwriting is a slow process of pulling ideas from the ether–a constant, fluid conversation rather than abrupt flashes of inspiration or any kind of prompt-driven session. Eventually, they collect stray chords and melodies from a trove of voice memos, distilling and often narrowing to a particular instrument–synths on 2017's Life After Youth, acoustic guitar on 2020's Indistinct Conversations, piano on Performances, and now the smaller parlor acoustic for the intimacy of LASTS. These eight songs travel through everything that was on Powell's mind in these years: sexual abuse and grooming in the music industry, the sharp polarity of the beauty they see in their artist peers and the toxicity they see in industry power brokers, the mortality of their parents ('Funeral clothes have been packed a few times,' they say of various close calls), the ongoing process of understanding their identity as a non-binary person. They often forge ahead with the songs in hopes of communing with others who have experienced the same: 'Music is medicine for me, and I know that if this song helps me feel better, maybe someone else will feel heard and understood.'
Though there is a raw, in-the-room quality that conjures the scrappier rock of early Land of Talk albums, there's also a humid, dreamlike quality to the performances–a sense that something new is gradually emerging over the course of each song, just as Powell's writing had rested on nothing being certain aside from the magic and mystery of how the ideas arrived to them. The end result is an album both lean and winding, allowing Powell's words and melodies to take centerstage, uncrowded in visceral, shot-no-chaser arrangements.
If there's an end to the journey of LASTS, it's in the willful imperfection of its closing title track. Powell allowed the song to sit, with all its uncalculated breaths and lack of resolution. That, to them, was part of the point–frustration that some things can never be resolved beyond the recognition we're not alone, or that we need to keep moving while carrying everything from our past. 'I have this sense that everything is unraveling, decaying,' Powell concludes. 'These songs are me trying to stay safe, to ride right in the barrel of the wave.' That poignant final image defines LASTS. Drawing upon everything Land of Talk and Powell have been in two decades, the album becomes a document of the simple yet implausible act of survival.
Tracklist
1. Broken Tongue
2. Saffron
3. 4:44
4. Dogs
5. Cats
6. Projections
7. Cedars
8. Lasts
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