Racing through the dark ahead

I saw a path–it made no sense—

Thought it was an accident

Shearwater frontman Jonathan Meiburg is calling from a research ship in Antarctica. He sounds tired, but punchy; he’s been up allnight with a crew of scientists studying the bizarre life of the polar seafloor. “And night’s only a concept here,” he adds. “It’s summer right now, so the sun never sets”

What had he seen in the deep dark, hundreds of meters down?

“Still learning,” Meiburg admits. “I can identify glass sponges, feather stars, and pycnogonids, but a lot of them…” He trails off. “Honestly, a lot of them are weird animals that look like weird plants. It’s wild down here.”

We’re supposed to be talking about Shearwater’s latest album, The New World—a rich and arresting LP that, to these ears, is the band’s best to date. But it’s not easy to keep Meiburg on topic, and our conversation keeps drifting toward the astonishing scenes and animals of the far south. It’s no surprise that he’s recently become an author; of his debut, A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey (Knopf, 2021), one reviewer wrote that “calling this a bird book is like calling Moby-Dick a whaling manual.”

By the end of the call I’ve googled “Antarctic scaleworm,” “stalked crinoid,“ and “harp ctenophore,” and marveled at the results. ButI’ve also searched up the unclassifiable polyinstrumentalists Shahzad Ismaily and Thor Harris, members of the nimble Malian ensemble Ngoni Ba, qanun wizard Firaz Zreik, and woodwind legend Doug Wieselman–all of whom perform on The New World alongside Meiburg and his fellow Shearwaters Emily Lee and Dan Duszynski.

“It’s the wildest and most talented ensemble we’ve ever assembled,” Meiburg says. It’s also right for the material: the album’s nine songs unfold like a globe-spanning journey to the heart of a deep mystery, seen through a kaleidoscope of emotions: hope, confusion, regret, tenderness, awe. Sometimes all at once.

And once you dive in, it’s nearly impossible not to take in the entire record. Longtime Shearwater fans will greet it like an old friend: the songs are enigmatic, stirring, and thick with atmospheric details. But it also rings with a new clarity and depth, and Meiburg’s voice sits boldly at the front of the mix. (Except on one track—one of the album’s best surprises.)

The New World is also an artistic risk. After years of working with labels, Shearwater chose to crowdfund and release the albumthemselves, distilling it from four years of traveling, fieldwork, and collaboration. It was recorded in London, Berlin, New York, and the band’s Texas headquarters, with Duszynski as chief engineer and additional production by Leo Abrahams and Danny Reisch; Reisch mixed the album with the band in Los Angeles.

Meiburg’s field recordings, woven throughout, stretch The New World’s geographic range still further; we hear German church bells and blackbirds, Tasmanian rivers and forest ravens, coyotes in the California mountains.

Toward the end of our call, I can’t help asking Meiburg if his scientific and musical work have started to bleed into each other. He laughs. “I used to worry about keeping those separate,” he says. “Now it all feels like one big project.”

So what’s the project? Meiburg hesitates.

“I think most of us,” he says, “me included, don’t understand where we really are. Not viscerally.. And when I feel hopeless oruseless, contemplating the living world–the one outside the internet–is the only thing that helps. It’s so much stranger and more beautiful than you think.”

As if to prove his point, Meiburg left the studio for Antarctica the day after The New World was completed, joining the ship in Africaand steaming south for weeks across the southern ocean. Now, deep in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, he’s used spare moments to film a video for “Daydream Unbeliever,” The New World’s first single. It’s classic Shearwater: a majestic but elliptical declaration of defiance and liberation that feels almost like a manifesto.

Nothing is ordinary, Meiburg sings. Hold the lens up to the light. Or wander around in hell.