The Innocence Mission, the long-running folk band from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, released the gorgeous See You Tomorrow, their most recent LP, in January 2020. A year later, bandleader Karen Peris released her solo album A Song Is Way Above The Lawn. Now, the Innocence Record have announced their plan to release a new record called Midwinter Swimmers before winter arrives.

Karen Peris co-wrote “This Thread Is A Green Street,” the opening track from Midwinter Swimmers with her husband and bandmate Don Peris, and it casts a dreamy, pastoral spell. Karen wrote every other track on the album herself. As Brooklyn Vegan points out, Karen describes the single as “a sort of envisioning the landscape as a world of doorways that might allow us to locate memory or to be nearer in some way to people we miss.” She continues:

The transportive quality of scenes we might come upon in the natural world, or even in everyday objects — a sewing thread when I’m mending something could remind me of a street map. One of the things about recording it was how to find this feeling inside the sound and how to find the half-remembered beauty of sing-alongs of our 1970s childhoods. There’s a search in recording that goes on being elusive, in a good way.

Karen Peris directed the video for “This Thread Is A Green Street” as a work of hand-stitched animation. Check out the clip and the Midwinter Swimmers tracklist below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “This Thread Is A Green Street”
02 “Midwinter Swimmers”
03 “The Camera That Divides The Coast Of Maine”
04 “John Williams”
05 “We Would Meet In Center City”
06 “Your Saturday Picture”
07 “Cloud To Cloud”
08 “A Hundred Flowers”
09 “Orange Of The Westering Sun”
10 “Sisters And Brothers”
11 “A Different Day”

Midwinter Swimmers is out 11/29 on Therese/Bella Union.