When the pandemic began, many musicians pushed back the release of their new albums. Laura Marling chose the opposite strategy: She had been planning to release new album Song For Our Daughter in the fall but decided to put it out right away, a gesture we greatly appreciated at the time. That album was addressed to an imaginary daughter, but in the years since, Marling actually has given birth to a baby girl. She’s also conceived a new LP titled Patterns In Repeat, announced today with the release of lead single “Patterns.”

Marling shared this statement:

Over the course of nine months, I had happily prepared myself for the fact that my life as a songwriter would be put on hold while I adjusted to life as a new parent. How delighted then was I to discover that for the first few months of a baby’s life, you can bounce them in a bouncer and play guitar all day. For the first time in my life, I was able to gaze into another human’s eyes as I wrote. Of course, new parents feel like they discovered that feeling – one of the very finest that life has to offer, of looking into the eyes of your child and feeling the enormity of the picture as a whole, the enormity of a precarious life, celestial, fragile and extraordinary, taking its place among the comparatively banal constellation of a family. This banal constellation seems to have dominated the writing of Patterns in Repeat – the drama of the domestic sphere, the frail threads that bind a family together, the good intentions we hold onto for our progeny and the many and various ways they get lost in time. So much complexity in the banal, the caged, the everyday.

Being as I am, 34 years old, now 15 years and 8 albums into a life in song, I am unable to escape the fact that each record has served as a time-stamped chapter of my life (though some have appeared more a premonition). Now, here we are, following a youth spent desperately trying to understand what it is to be a woman, I am at the brow of the hill, with an entirely new and enormous perspective surrounding me.

In addition to the new album, Marling recently began discussing songwriting at a newly launched Substack, and she’ll be playing residencies this fall in London and New York. As for “Patterns,” it’s is a fingerpicked acoustic ballad fleshed out with a gorgeous string arrangement, and it’s liable to send you careening into your feelings. Listen below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Child Of Mine”
02 “Patterns”
03 “Your Girl”
04 “No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can”
05 “The Shadows
06 “Interlude
07 “Caroline
08 “Looking Back”
09 “Lullaby”
10 “Patterns In Repeat”

TOUR DATES:
10/29 – London, UK @ Hackney Church
10/30 – London, UK @ Hackney Church
11/01 – London, UK @ Hackney Church
11/02 – London, UK @ Hackney Church
11/11 – New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
11/12 – New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom

Patterns In Repeat is out 10/25 via Partisan/Chrysalis. Pre-order it here.