Last year, Phil Elverum played a show under the name the Microphones for the first time since 2003, when he started recording as Mount Eerie. And now, there’s apparently a whole new Microphones album on the way.

According to Elverum, Microphones In 2020 was “recorded nowhere” between May 2019 and May 2020 and consists entirely of one 44-minute song. It’ll be out in August on Elverum’s own P.W. Elverum & Sun label.

A short film accompanying Microphones In 2020, described in a press release as “a lyric video slideshow of sorts,” will premiere the day before the album drops. Watch a teaser video and read Elverum’s statement about reviving the Microphones project below.

Microphones In 2020 is out 8/7 via P.W. Elverum & Sun. Pre-order it here.

I used to call my recordings a different name. A small clump of albums from 1997-2002 were called “the Microphones,” including some popular ones. But the essence of this project has never really changed: me exploring autobiographically in sound and words with occasional loose participation from friends. The name it has been called has never mattered much to me.

In the summer of 2019 I played a little local concert under the old name for no big reason. The little flurry of weird attention around this announcement got me thinking about what it even means to step back into an old mode. Self commemoration would be embarrassing. I don’t want to go backwards ever. There is nothing to reunite. So I nudged into the future with these ideas and came up with this large song. It took almost a year to write and record, working constantly at home, digging through the archives, playing the same two chords forever on the same $5 first guitar. In it I have tried to get at the heart of what defined that time in my life, my late teens and early twenties, but even more importantly, I tried to break the spell of nostalgia and make something perennial and enduring. All past selves existing at once in this inferno present moment. The song doesn’t seem to end. That’s the point.

We all crash through life prodded and diverted by our memories. There is a way through to disentanglement. Burn your old notebooks and jump through the smoke. Use the ashes to make a new thing.