One doesn’t just go to a 40 Watt Sun gig, you make a pilgrimage. Rare as they are, their live appearances tend to get spoken about in hushed tones both before and after the event, as if they’re spaces of refuge where rare magic can unfurl.
Formed from the ashes of much-loved English doom outfit Warning, 40 Watt Sun takes frontman Patrick Walker’s muse into sparser, more pastoral realms, marked out by crestfallen, minor-chord cadences like the spent fuel of emotional fallout and Patrick’s whittled, heart-wrenchingly soulful, last-train-departed vocals, offering a compassionate and slate-cleaning last rites.
Five years after the release of their debut album, The Inside Room, 40 Watt Sun are about to replenish the parched with the new dawn that is the evocatively titled follow-up, Wider than the Sky, released via the band’s own Radiance Records on October 14. In a similar fashion to the equally revered Bohren & Der Club Of Gore and Earth, it’s an album whose generous, unhurried allowance of space winds down your sense of time until a new level of alertness becomes possible. We are honoured to present a very exclusive preview in the forlorn yet entrancing form of Beyond You, a journey into personal hinterlands through to the other side, and whose bounties reveal themselves over its 10 heart-thawing minutes.
“It’s hard for me to be objective about the songs on this new record,” says Patrick himself, “and each of them is as meaningful to me as the next, so I left it to my bandmates to choose which song to premier and they both favoured Beyond You. I don’t find it easy to talk about my own music, and I’m not convinced I necessarily should, but I’m asked to say a few words about this song. It’s about short-lived escape and sanctuary; of a deep sense of completion and of safety and well-being; and yet simultaneously feeling in those moments its impermanence and the pain of that; of trying to protract and even reserve that experience and that sense of love and life.”
Life is short, art is long, so lose yourself in the timeless wonder that is Beyond You below!
Stop for a pint at 40 Watt Sun’s Facebook page here
And pre-order Wider than the Sky here!
