Into a Fog Bank: Shearwater on 'The New World' and Their 'Three Bands, One Band' UK Tour
Monday, 14 September 2026
Written by Jeremy Blackmore
Photo: J Benson
For Jonathan Meiburg, completing the latest Shearwater album did not signal the usual move into a rehearsal space to prepare for a promotional tour. Instead, pursuing his ancillary career as a natural historian, Meiburg took to the high seas aboard a scientific research vessel bound for Antarctica, where the crew spent two months of perpetual daylight surveying the ocean floor, lowering cameras thousands of metres below.
The awe in his voice is palpable as he describes the experience. “There are a lot of animals that live down there that aren’t penguins, that aren’t seals, that aren’t whales,” he says. “This is a place where it’s minus two degrees all the time. There’s never any light, and you would think this would not be a place where there would be an awful lot living, but in fact, it’s lush. Gardens of sponges, giant sponges the size of 30-gallon drums, which might be centuries old.”
He talks excitedly about giant sea spiders and scale worms, ice fish and brittle stars of varying sizes. “We were watching this go by on these monitors hour after hour,” he continues. “And you think, ‘This is a place where there’s probably never been light, ever.’ And we’re it for a second. No one’s probably ever seen this place, and may never ever see it again, which almost feels like a responsibility.”
On ‘The New World’, Shearwater’s recently-unveiled new record, it’s that connection with both the natural environment and with his fellow humans that Meiburg finds solace in, feeling the creep of technology and division all around. It’s perhaps evident in song titles such as A Mink In The Dusk and Slugs In The Marigold, but also through the field recordings of blackbirds that usher in second single More and More, not to mention the toucan solo on Shearwater’s last album ‘The Great Awakening’.
He explains what the ‘The New World’ signifies: “It’s the world we’re in now. The first lyric of the record is, ‘racing through the dark ahead’, and to me that’s what life feels like now. It feels like we’re just driving at top speed at night into a fog bank. So, in that sense, that’s the new world. But I also was thinking about moments of contact between people and animals, between human cultures.”
Expanding on the idea of fog and chaos in today’s world, Meiburg adds that, as an American, “it seems like we descended into hell in the pandemic and never left somehow.” But he steers the conversation back to his upcoming book The Once And Future Life of Antarctica and the field research he undertook for that and his previous book A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Bird of Prey, a voyage to better understand striated caracaras.
Later, he contrasts that with AI: “The internet doesn’t know what the internet doesn’t know, but the world is real, still. Research and experiences that I have been lucky enough to have, which have brought me into contact with that [nature], in a very tactile and immediate way, are a great relief.”
Finding solace in communion with people is nowhere more apparent than the moments where the core Shearwater trio of Meiburg, Emily Lee and Dan Duszynski are joined by a host of guest musicians. The immersive music shifts from minimalist, jazz-inflected woodwinds and percussion and Talk Talk-style art-pop to rippling West African rhythms performed by percussionists Mahamadou Tounkara and Moctar Kouyate, and ngoni lines from Mamadou Kouyate, with flashes of Middle Eastern colour from Farouz Zriek’s qanun.
The album’s personnel opened up during a few weeks recording at Shahzad Ismaily’s Figure 8 studio in Brooklyn, which brought Shearwater into contact with a revolving cast of musicians. “Figure 8 is a studio where there’s just always all these super talented musicians coming and going through its two studios, kind of at all hours of the day,” explains Meiburg. “There’s a beautiful sort of chaos to it. I mean, you can wall yourself off, but if you allow people to flow through…normally that would drive me crazy. But there’s some spell cast on Figure 8 where it’s wonderful.”
Ismaily called Shearwater before they departed Austin to record at Figure 8, letting them know there were Malian musicians in town and to ask if they had heard of a ngoni. Meiburg’s answer was emphatic. “Absolutely, yes! Whatever this is, whether we can use it or not, this will be a memorable musical experience,” he says. “And we’ll learn something from being around musicians of this calibre. Those guys completely transformed a couple of the songs that ended up on this record.”
In fact, their work on The High Ranges, and particularly A Mink in the Dusk, prompted Shearwater to erase their original rhythm track and rebuild the songs around their guest musicians’ performances, scattering almost discordant piano and guitar runs throughout to provide extra colour. “People who come to your music with a completely different approach can show you things that your song could be, or places in your song you never would have seen otherwise,” Meiburg says. “That’s probably the thing I love most about making music — working with other people and having multiple brains working on the same problem. With writing, you don't get that, it’s just you versus yourself.”
Lead single Daydream Unbeliever, its video featuring striking footage from Meiburg’s Antarctic adventures, was one of the first songs recorded for the album at Einstürzende Neubauten’s studio in Berlin, with Meiburg’s friend Jamie Stewart, of the band Xiu Xiu, producing. Stewart’s late uncle, John, was the writer of The Monkees’ 1967 hit Daydream Believer, prompting Meiburg to ponder a song with the opposite title. “I started to think about what that might mean,” he observes. “I thought about all these sorts of fantasies that we're told to believe in, and how difficult it is not to believe in them. But then the moments when you do, it’s a real rush. You realise that you’ve kind of broken out of something.”
When it seems as if the album is at an end, amid hypnotic, cascading piano and a wandering clarinet, a voice appears. Shearwater deliberately kept the identity of that voice out of initial press releases to give listeners a sense of surprise on hearing the album for the first time. It belongs to art-pop pioneer Laurie Anderson, of O Superman, fame, reflecting candidly on a life-changing walk on a beach many years ago.
“I wanted people to have the experience where she just suddenly is there, after some time too,” Meiburg explains. “So, you’ve kind of gotten used to this [piano and clarinet], and you think, ‘Okay, what’s going to happen here? Is this just a little segue? A pleasant place to be?’ But then, she appears and starts leading you on this journey.”
The collaboration follows Meiburg’s work with Anderson in Manchester on a show called Arc. Having grown used to hearing her voice, he says it was easy to imagine the final track with her present. “A few months later, these two takes of it appeared in my inbox, and they were really different emotionally,” he reflects. “The end product is a combination of the two, and I just couldn’t have been more pleased with it.”
Scientific expeditions over, for now, Shearwater set off on a tour of the UK and Europe this October and November, co-headlining with Loma, Meiburg and Duszynski’s other band, fronted by Emily Cross, and with Duszynski’s Any Kind project opening. “Both bands have put out two records since we last toured,” Meiburg says.
“So there’s a lot of stuff to work with that’s never been performed, using more-or-less the same ensemble. We’re joking about this being the ‘three bands, one band’ tour — just six musicians. It’s going to be great value for money, I’ll tell you that much! It'll be like being like a theatre troupe in rep, where you’re doing two different productions. The energy of both sets is going to be quite different.”
Shearwater Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Sat October 31 2026 - MAASTRICHT Muziekgieterij (Netherlands)
Sun November 01 2026 - AMSTERDAM Bitterzoet (Netherlands)
Mon November 02 2026 - HAMBURG Betty (Germany)
Tue November 03 2026 - ODENSE Musikhuset Posten (Denmark)
Wed November 04 2026 - COPENHAGEN Beta (Denmark)
Thu November 05 2026 - BERLIN Privatclub (Germany)
Sun November 08 2026 - KORTRIJK Sonic City (Belgium)
Mon November 09 2026 - PARIS Petit Bain (France)
Tue November 10 2026 - BREDA MEZZ (Netherlands)
Wed November 11 2026 - GRONINGEN Vera (Netherlands)
Thu November 12 2026 - TURNHOUT De Warande (Belgium)
Sat November 14 2026 - MUNICH Ampere (Germany)
Sun November 15 2026 - GENEVA L Usine (Switzerland)
Mon November 16 2026 - ZURICH Bogen F (Switzerland)
Thu November 19 2026 - LONDON Garage
Fri November 20 2026 - MANCHESTER Deaf Institute
Sat November 21 2026 - GLASGOW Cathouse Rock Club
Sun November 22 2026 - BRISTOL Strange Brew
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