Laura Marling announces today that she will release her new album, her 8th, ‘Patterns in Repeat’, on October 25th. Plus, the first single ‘Patterns’ is out now. If you’re around, Laura will be playing two intimate live residencies in both London and New York. The residencies span four nights at London’s Hackney Church on November 29th, 30th, 1st and 2nd and two nights in New York on November 11th and 12th at the Bowery Ballroom. Here’s the official press release, tracklist and the beautiful acoustic single:
«’Patterns in Repeat’ was written, recorded and produced by Laura in her home studio in London. If 2020’s acclaimed ‘Song For Our Daughter’ was written figuratively and from the perspective of writing for and about a fictional daughter, Patterns in Repeat was written after the birth of her daughter in 2023 and finds Laura reflecting on the patterns at play in the constellation of a family. The songs draw on a very specific and revealing moment in her life, delving deeper into her analysis of the ideas and behaviors we endure through family over generations.
The album was recorded almost entirely in Marling’s home studio and co-produced by Dom Monks, with additional assistance from string maestro Rob Moose, and reflects not only the metaphorical intimacy of the album’s content, but also a purely circumstantial intimacy, with her daughter often alongside Laura at these recording sessions.
And this is what she says herself: “Over the course of nine months, I happily prepared myself for the fact that my life as a composer would be put on hold while I adjusted to life as a new mother. How happy I was then to discover that for the first few months of a baby’s life, you can rock it in a hammock and play guitar all day. For the first time in my life, I could look into the eyes of another human being while I wrote. Of course, new parents feel that they have discovered that feeling, one of the best life has to offer, of looking into the eyes of their child and feeling the enormity of the bigger picture, the enormity of a precarious, heavenly, fragile, extraordinary life taking its place among the comparatively banal constellation of a family. This banal constellation seems to have dominated the writing of Patterns in Repeat: the drama of the domestic sphere, the fragile threads that bind a family together, the good intentions we keep for our offspring and the many and varied ways in which they are lost in time. So much complexity in the banal, the caged, the everyday.
“At 34, with 15 years and 8 albums of it spent on songs, I can’t get away from the fact that each record has served as a time-stamped chapter in my life (though some have felt more like a premonition). Now, here we are, following a young woman who spent her time desperately trying to understand what it’s like to be a woman, I’m at the top of the hill, with a whole new and vast perspective surrounding me.”
01 Child of Mine
02 Patterns
03 Your Girl
04 No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can
05 The Shadows
06 Interlude
07 Caroline
08 Looking Back
09 Lullaby
10 Patterns in Repeat
