Car Colors is the new solo project of Charles Bissell, longtime Wrens co-frontman and studio tinkerer extraordinaire. A month ago, Bissell announced that Absolutely Kosher — the long-defunct record label that released the Wrens’ masterpiece The Meadowlands 20 years ago — was coming back to release Bissell’s Car Colors album. He also revealed that “Old Death,” the first Car Colors single, would be out today. And it is! Holy shit, it actually is!

The Car Colors album contains material that would have been on the next Wrens record if co-frontman Kevin Whelan hadn’t grown impatient with Bissell’s endless postponements and funneled his own songs into new band Aeon Station. And “Old Death” — friends, it sounds like a motherfucking Wrens song. Seven minutes long and buoyed by triumphal brass, it strikes me as a brilliant update on that ambitious, expansive, world-shattering, life-affirming Meadowlands sound. I’ve been waiting two decades for this moment. I can’t believe it’s really here and really this good.

In a press release, Bissell shared this statement:

“Old Death” is, like the rest of the album, sort of a sequel to The Meadowlands before it and like that one, is about time, how one chooses to spend it, what those choices cost. That means for me, the song (and album) is also about making the album itself. It’s about death, maybe obviously, but it’s really about my dumb life. And because so much of that life lined up weirdly well to the Odyssey, it’s all sorta hung on Homer’s narrative framework (while I unlike say, Ulysses, in my case it’s all very non-fictional/auto-biographical). However like Ulysses, every song is written in a stream-of-consciousness mode. Or for me, really more of a stream-of-memories: that time this happened, that other-time-this-reminds-me-of happened etc. Hence, the parenthetical dating throughout the lyrics as those memories pop in & out. So basically like, unlike, like and then unlike Ulysses – ha.

Watch director Kyle Garrett’s “Old Death” video below.

UPDATE: Looks like both of the B-sides, “And It’s All Guns And Arrows” and “I’ll Bear,” are available to stream on Spotify:

Info on the Car Colors album is supposedly coming soon. Get stoked!