Hiss Golden Messenger has announced a new album, Jump For Joy. In the past couple years, the project’s mastermind MC Taylor has been one-half of Revelators Sound System and released a Christmas album; this is his proper follow-up to 2021’s Quietly Blowing It. His new one is described as “a sort of epistolary,” songs written between Taylor and an imagined alias named Michael Crow, a young and hopeful drummer. “The tunes on Jump For Joy were composed in free moments throughout 2022, a year during which Hiss was on the road more or less constantly,” Taylor said in a statement, continuing:

And perhaps because the post-pandemic energy out in the world felt so chaotic and uncertain, I found myself thinking a lot about the role that music has played in my life and how exactly I ended up in the rarefied position of leading a band and crew all over the globe through dingy graffiti-scrawled green rooms, venerated music halls, dust-blown roadside motels. Sometimes playing in front of 5,000; sometimes 200. Sleeping sitting up. Laughing because my stomach hurts. Not being able to fall asleep at 3 a.m. in some anonymous bed because my mind is spinning with anxiety of depression or adrenaline, or because my ears are still ringing. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, then robbing Paul to pay Peter back. Over and over again. It’s an outlaw life but one, I’m coming to realize, that makes me happy.

Listen to lead single “Nu-Grape” below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “20 Years And A Nickel”
02 “Alice”
03 “I Saw The New Day In The World”
04 “Shinbone”
05 “Little Pink Church”
06 “Jesus Is Bored”
07 “Nu-Grape”
08 “Feeling Eternal”
09 “Jump For Joy”
10 “The Wondering”
11 “Palo Santo / Cloud Mesa”
12 “California King”
13 “My Old Friends”
14 “Sunset On The Faders”

Jump For Joy is out 8/25 via Merge Records.