“Let’s go for a walk / don’t talk,” sings Lea Thomas in the opening lines of ‘The Gift’, the lead single from new album Cosmos Forever. “Try to be a deeper listener / try a little less / remember /we already are.” Hailing from Maui, Hawaii and currently based in upstate New York, the songwriter first caught our attention back in 2021 with Mirrors to the Sun, an album which “ponder[ed] the impermanence so familiar to the ecological sphere,” as we put it in a review, “though emerg[ed] from the melancholy with a sense of healing and power.” The very opening of ‘The Gift’ shows Thomas heading further into such themes, tracing the natural world in all of its complex networks and simple beauties and positioning it as a kind of balm to the woes of contemporary living.
The songs reflect this intention, providing soundscapes spacious and nuanced enough to become sonic representations of the environments which inspired them. Nico Osborne (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, contrabass, analog processing), Brendan Mulvihill (electric bass, synthesizers, analog processing), Jeremy Mendicino (electric guitar, twelve string guitar, acoustic guitar, analog processing) and John Thayer (drums, analog processing, noise) all lend their talents too, allowing Lea Thomas to weave tracks of layered richness in which the audience can lose themselves.
This sense of encompassing warmth is central to the record, and signifies the notable diversion from her previous work. Mirrors to the Sun might have celebrated nature but could never quite emerge from beneath the anthropogenic calamity it currently faces. “Implicit in any engagement with the natural world is its ever accelerating collapse,” we wrote in our piece on the record, with songs like ‘Heat Keeps Rising’ facing up to “the ongoing disaster in all its overwhelming weight, not to mention the dizzying strangeness of living through such a time.” But Cosmos Forever opts for a different outlook. One not naïve to the present situation, but determined to decentre the human within its arrangement. Which means a willingness to let go of the anxiety of unanswered questions and worries about the future to lose oneself within an ecological present.
Everything is one
And you already hold
The gift
The song comes complete with a video directed and edited by Dave Yim, with additional creative direction by Phil Robibero, which taps into the environment which proved so central to the song. “I moved from New York City to a small town in the Catskills a few years ago, and daily walks through the landscape have become an important ritual,” Thomas explains. “One of my favourite trails starts in an open meadow and winds into the woods, echoed in the arch of this video. The song follows a similar path, from light to dark, day to night, known to unknown.” Watch the video below:
Cosmos Forever is out on the 20th September and you can pre-order it now from the Lea Thomas Bandcamp page.
Photo by Wyndham Garnett, album art Artwork by Iruka Maria Toro w/ design by Daniel Murphy