Over the last few months, Rostam Batmanglij has shared a couple of new tracks, “Unfold You” and “These Kids We Knew,” and today he’s officially announcing his sophomore album, Changephobia, the follow-up to his 2017 solo debut Half-Light. “This collection of songs is not celebrating a fear of change,” Batmanglij wrote in a statement about the album’s title. “Rather, it’s the opposite. It’s about who we are capable of becoming if we recognize these fears in ourselves and rise above them.”

Today, Rostam is sharing a new single called “4Runner,” a crisp and kaleidoscopic track that taps into some of the same narrativizing that he did on Discovery’s best, this time centered around a couple who takes to the road. “Sleeping behind the wheel/ Pulled over on the freeway/ 4Runner, stolen plates/ Long, long gone,” Batmanglij sings on it.

Listen below.

Here’s Rostam’s full statement on the album:

A few years ago I met a stranger on a park bench, somehow I found myself opening up to him; revealing recent changes in my life that had altered its course, and he said, “Change is good. Go with it.” I realized that I had never heard that sentiment expressed before.

Transphobia, biphobia, homophobia — these words hold a weight of threat, and it occurred to me that the threats they bare— the fears they describe— are rooted in a fear of change: a fear of the unknown, of a future that is not yet familiar, one in which there is a change of traditions, definitions, and distributions of power.

So gender, too, was on my mind while creating this album, as I came to find myself writing about love and connection but not wanting to place relationships in a gendered context.

This collection of songs is not celebrating a fear of change. Rather, it’s the opposite. It’s about who we are capable of becoming if we recognize these fears in ourselves and rise above them.

TRACKLIST:
01 “These Kids We Knew”
02 “From The Back Of A Cab”
03 “Unfold You”
04 “4Runner”
05 “Changephobia”
06 “Kinney”
07 “Bio18”
08 “[interlude]”
09 “To Communicate”
10 “Next Thing”
11 “Starlight”

Changephobia is out 6/4 via Matsor Projects/Secretly Distribution.