Angel Olsen Premieres ‘Whole New Mess’ Song/Video, New Album Out 8/28

On Tuesday, acclaimed indie/folk singer/songwriter Angel Olsen returned with a new music video for “Whole New Mess,” the title track off her upcoming album due out Aug. 28 via Jagjaguwar.

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Whole New Mess will be Olsen’s fifth full-length album and the follow-up to 2019’s All Mirrors. It will also be Olsen’s first material recorded without any band mates since her 2012 album Half Way Home.

Per a press release, Whole New Mess features many of the songs heard on 2019’s All Mirrors — but in more intimate, stripped-back arrangements:

At least nine of the eleven songs on Whole New Mess should sound familiar to anyone who has heard All Mirrors, Olsen’s grand 2019 masterpiece that earned high honors on prestigious year-end lists and glossy spreads in stylish magazines. “Lark,” “Summer,” “Chance”—they are all here, at least in some skeletal form and with slightly different titles. But these are not the demos for All Mirrors. Instead, Whole New Mess is its own record with its own immovable mood, with Olsen working through her open wounds and raw nerves with just a few guitars and some microphones, isolated in a century-old church in the Pacific Northwest. If the lavish orchestral arrangements and cinematic scope of All Mirrors are the sound of Olsen preparing her scars for the wider world to see, Whole New Mess is the sound of her first figuring out their shape, making sense for herself of these injuries.

Said Olsen of the new album and how the recordings came about:

“I had gone through this breakup, but it was so much bigger than that — I’d lost friendships, too. When you get out of a relationship, you have to examine who you are or were in all the relationships. I wanted to record when I was still processing these feelings. These are the personal takes, encapsulated in a moment.”

The album’s track listing:

1 Whole New Mess
2 Too Easy (Bigger Than Us)
3 (New Love) Cassette
4 (We Are All Mirrors)
5 (Summer Song)
6 Waving, Smiling
7 Tonight (Without You)
8 Lark Song
9 Impasse (Workin’ for the Name)
10 Chance (Forever Love)
11 What It Is (What It Is)

Stream 2019’s All Mirrors below, via Spotify: