Graveyard Club have released their new single, “Nowhere” taken from their just-announced album, Moonflower. The track, according to the band’s Matthew Schufman, “captures the sweet spot of what we frequently try to accomplish with a song – nostalgic, anthemic, longing, and bittersweet.” Listen to it now below.
Moonflower follows the Twin Cities band’s 2019 LP, Goodnight Paradise and is available for pre-order now HERE.
Graveyard Club have spent the intervening years since the release of Goodnight Paradise reflecting and reassessing the trajectory of their own personal lives. A reckoning only hastened by the world events that have unfolded since. Schufman has a large hand painted wooden sign purchased at a Minneapolis antiques shop hanging in his dining room, emblazoned with the word “bittersweet”, a word he feels fits the record perfectly. When the sense of optimism and wonder has faded, what’s left is the question stated in the lead single “Valens”, “where is this going?” There is a specific feeling of immortality that comes with being young, and while some tracks revel in that, others like “Halloween” and “Elegy”, a song about stumbling upon the corpse of a neighbor’s pet, are about contending with the end of the line.
But Moonflower is far from mired within that sentiment. Like the flora that gives rise to the album’s namesake, something beautiful can be found blooming in the darkness. Moonflower longs for space to dream, plan, and ponder what to do with this one life. “When I was younger,” shares Schufman, “my friends would all talk about how they couldn’t wait to grow up and I always felt the opposite – I wanted to stay young and just spend time daydreaming, imagining, and getting lost.” Songs like “Nowhere”, “Spellsong”, and “Rose Vine” are packed with nervous butterflies. “Spirit Boy”, “is a love song written to my childhood self,” shares Schufman, “just trying to remember all the ways I was once a wild being filled with endless imagination and enthusiasm for life.” Those feelings are hard to hang on to as you grow older – the wonder, the innocence, and the appreciation for this strange place. But in their music’s most sublime moments, Graveyard Club are able to channel them through sound and voice to chilling effect.
The songs on Moonflower were mostly written from early 2020 into the spring of 2021. Like many artists, the band found recording challenging during the pandemic. “We all had to create makeshift recording set-ups in our homes,” shares Schufman. “I made a vocal booth out of PVC pipes and sleeping bags.” Other than a few very small parts, the record was recorded, mixed, and produced remotely. The distance created challenges but also a decisiveness in the way band members committed to their parts. When it came to mixing and production input, Beau Sorenson (Death Cab For Cutie, Sparklehorse, Bob Mould) and Andy Thompson (Taylor Swift, Dan Wilson, jeremy messersmith, Belle and Sebastian) lended their prowess to various songs on the album. Thompson, having had a hand in Goodnight Paradise, brought familiarity to the process, while Sorenson contributed a fresh perspective to the band’s music as a newcomer to their orbit.
As the members of Graveyard Club navigate their way through life, at its core, Moonflower is “an attempt to balance the longing for yesterday, and coming to grips with today,” says Schufman, “in all its ecstatic highs and defeating lows.” There is a certain beauty in acceptance, and “Elegy,” the album closer, tries to own that sentiment: “today I woke up feeling older, drag the lake, the summers’ over”, but ultimately rejects any definitive revelation and acknowledges the uncertainty of the present: “It’s all ahead or all behind me”.