When we last heard from Toronto avant-pop mastermind John Southworth earlier this year, he delivered one last moving video from his 2014 double-LP Niagara. Today he’s back with news of the follow-up album, Small Town Water Tower, and a subtly gorgeous lead single. “Second Childhood” is an understated new wave track in the vein of XTC, ripe with evocative lyrical turns like “Second childhood, sprouts are falling from my chin/ I have danced for days with soldiers in a high school gym.” Some background from Southworth:

To be played specifically at mountain town high school dances and reunions, at the end of Veterans Day events, to be hummed in secret passages beneath I-75 highway service centers, whistled on suburban trampolines, sung at midnight in old folks home cafeterias, in sincere plea to return into the silken childhood fold for a short dream, and once there, to lose form, shape, to lose, hug the beaten and most in pain, enter miniature clouds, rivers, valleys, meld the American years 1864 and 1964 together, be Bell Boyd, then Jan and Dean, then a flock of geese over Becky’s drive-in.

Most of all a going in and be merry song.

Listen below.

Tracklist:

01 “Blue Sleeves”
02 “Ain’t Got Time”
03 “Champion Of Love”
04 “Lucid Love”
05 “Make No Mistake”
06 “Ombudswoman”
07 “When The Angel”
08 “Main Library On Greenwood”
09 “Walk With Me”
10 “Sapphire Spirit”
11 “Second Childhood”
12 “Last Passenger Pigeon”

Here’s an album trailer, too:

Small Town Water Tower is out 11/4 on Tin Angel.