Armor For Sleep have made their long-awaited return today with “How Far Apart“, their first new music to be released in 15 years. The evocative anthem marks the first single to be released from their upcoming album, The Rain Museum, due out on Equal Vision Records this fall. The new album arrives almost 20 years after the release of their seminal full-length, What To Do When You Are Dead. Listen to the new track now below.
The Rain Museum is available for pre-order now HERE.
For the official video, which debuted alongside the song, Armor For Sleep tapped director Jesse Korman (Hot Water Music, The Juliana Theory). The collaboration yielded an emotionally-gripping tale of a life lived in reverse. The visual is cinematically beautiful and complex, matching the intensity of the track in lock-step. The band has always been celebrated for the cohesiveness of their releases – from narrative to artwork to videos – and this visual once again lives up to that high standard of cohesiveness and creativity.
Vocalist Ben Jorgensen said of the new album, “We are very excited to share our new album, ‘The Rain Museum’ with everyone. Back in 2020, at the start of the pandemic and at the start of our collective lockdown, I made it my mission to finish writing a concept album that I had the idea for for many years but was never able to bring to life. ‘The Rain Museum’ was initially a short story I wrote many years ago about a post-apocalyptic Earth and a mysterious museum in the middle of the desert. Weaving the story into an album was going to be my quarantine project. Unfortunately, my marriage of nearly eight years and basically my entire life fell apart as I was beginning the writing process. The one thing I had in my life to divert my attention from what I was going through was the creative process of writing that album… so I decided to push through and keep working on the record…but something weird happened. Because I couldn’t ignore what I was going through personally, I wound up writing myself and what I was going through into the story of the album and into the world I had been creating for this concept record. In the end, it’s an album about facing some of the most painful parts of being human and how lost we can get. I just hope it will speak to people going through their own dark times, as my favorite art certainly helped me get through mine.”
The Rain Museum is a concept album built around a post-apocalyptic world where weather no longer exists on planet earth and people come to a mysterious museum in the middle of the desert to look back on what life used to be like. Originally planned as the follow up to What to Do When You Are Dead, the album had been shelved due to “bad advice” leading the band in another direction. Fast forward to the global pandemic of 2020, and the events of the real world encouraged Jorgensen to revisit the concept. Concurrently, his marriage of eight years began to fall apart, leaving Jorgensen to further infuse the science-fiction story with elements of his real life. The result is a beautiful and devastating 12 song collection that draws upon the best elements of Armor For Sleep’s catalog while incorporating elevated songwriting and composition. After a fifteen year absence from the studio, The Rain Museum will undoubtedly prove to be well-worth the wait for old and new fans alike.
Tour Dates
7/31 – The Fillmore (Minneapolis, MN)
8/1 – The Village Theatre (Davenport, IA) * Headlining Show
8/2 – St. Louis Music Park (Maryland Heights, MO)
8/4 – Rock The Ruins (Indianapolis, IN)
8/5 – Agora Theater & Ballroom (Cleveland, OH)
8/6 – The Andrew J Brady Music Center (Cincinnati, OH)
8/8 – Kemba Live! (Columbus, OH)
8/9 – Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards (Lafayette, NY)
8/10 – Toyota Oakdale Theatre (Wallingford, CT)
8/12 – The Rooftop At Pier 17 (New York, NY)
8/13 – Stone Pony Summer Stage (Asbury Park, NJ)
8/14 – Skyline Stage At The Mann (Philadelphia, PA)
10/22 – 10/23, 10/29 – When We Were Young Fest (Las Vegas, NV)