Recorded at the legendary La Frette Studios, bird sees Low Island leave behind the considered indie-pop of sophomore album Life in Miniature for something altogether more ambitious: an album as brash as it is tender, exploring the struggle to find freedom and presence in an increasingly automated world.

bird began two years ago, when singer Carlos Posada would bring sketches of songs to the band’s Oxford studio. There, with bandmates Jamie Jay, Jacob Lively, and Felix Higginbottom, they would endlessly rehearse, re-write, and realise those sketches into living, breathing songs. At La Frette Studios, with the guidance of one of their musical heroes Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear, Terrible Records, Solange, Moses Sumney), the disparate influences and personalities that have shaped the band’s sound were pushed to their extremes. The result is an album where Jay’s guitars and synths screech with unhinged anger as much as they wail with anguish; Lively’s bass dances frantically whilst swimming underneath the songs with an effortless beauty; Higginbottom’s drums are as deft as they are punishing; Posada’s voice as frail as it is resilient.

These emotional polarities speak to the heart of bird: a coming to terms with the overwhelming breadth of experience in the modern world, trapped as we are in our own bodies. How do we act in the face of this? Do we try to reach beyond ourselves? Wish to be saved or transformed? Retreat inwards? Or embrace things as they are? These are the questions that haunt bird in its search for freedom and presence.

The first single, ‘spit it out,’ is accompanied by a video featuring actor Jonty Weston, directed by fashion photographer Brian Rankin, and shot by upcoming filmmaker Ben Ogunbiyi. On the track and video, Posada relates:

‘The writer Mark Deuze said that our lives are lived ‘in social media, rather than with it.’ Practically everything we do now is contained and shaped within platform environments owned by a handful of billionaires. There’s something not only so claustrophobic about that to me, but also unbearable; rage, despair and dissent-inducing all at the same time. We wanted to explore this range of emotions in the song and video; a character torn between a kind of hopeless surrender and furious resistance.’

The May album shows will be an opportunity for audiences to experience the music of bird ‘In the Round’ for a string of intimate album launch parties. Access tour pre-sale here.