Opener ‘Julie’ is simple and quietly devastating, the soft and sincere tone masking a message that is devoid of hope. Framed as a reminiscence, the song focuses on snippets of conversation and images of the surrounding world as it continues to spin around a moment of very human struggle. It serves as both an introduction and a challenge to the rest of the album. “I see the first song as a hypothesis,” Yield describes in an interview with Post-Trash, “that there’s no consolation to be had for the fact of being a human being, and then the album is a kind of answer to that.”

and I stayed, thinking I would console you
tell you something so pretty that it would have to be true
but I’ll have a lot of letdowns before I learn my worth
and there are no consolations to be had upon the earth

Sam Yield draws on all kinds of things to try to get close to this answer. Personal memories mingle with images of nature (“must be the stillness of the hawk,” goes ‘This Must Be’, “coasting on its dream above your parents’ house in Newark”) and philosophical musings (such as the reference to St Anselm and his ontological argument for the existence of God on ‘Heraclitus’). The album’s title itself refers to the hypothetical southern continent that appeared on European maps from the 16th Century, a notional land that symbolizes both a haven of escape and a bleak and unforgiving void. What Yield describes as “an imagined utopia and also this barren iced-over nothing.”

This imagery comes to the fore on ‘A Winter Country’, the album’s mid- and arguably low-point. It’s an exploration of melancholy, Yield’s near-whispered vocals set against a dense mat of fingerpicked guitar and background banjo as he longs for escape to the south. “I’d like to migrate to a winter country,” he sings. “Terra Australis, land of white flowers.”

From there the album finds a different energy, subtly pivoting toward something less despondent. Take the babbling brook harmonies of ‘Hurricane’ or the sober acceptance of ‘It’s Good To Stand In The Minor Light.’ The sense things have moved on. The understanding that while some wounds never heal, you can learn to carry them a little easier. Nowhere is this feeling more evident than on ‘Jubilee,’ three minutes of benevolent reprieve that refers to the Old Testament occasion of mercy and freedom.

Tomorrow’s coming, but it ain’t here yet
and you were right the time you said
there’s a wage for living and the wage is death
but just for now you have no debts

Terra Australis is out now on Plastic Miracles and available on cassette and digital via the Sam Yield Bandcamp page.

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