Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out turned 20 earlier this year. Good album, right? The indie rock luminaries are still at it. In 2018, they put out their most recent full-length, There’s A Riot Going On and they’ve been keeping busy since then with their annual Hanukkah shows and even a song about Hanukkah.

Today, the band is sharing a new piece called “James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds,” which was recorded in the group’s rehearsal space. The band’s Ira Kaplan explains:

If you’ve spent any time hanging out with us at our rehearsal space in Hoboken — that pretty much covers none of you — you’ve heard us playing formlessly (he said, trying to sidestep the word “improvising”). Most of the songs we’ve written in the last 25 years have begun that way, but often we do it for no other reason than to push away the outside world.

In late April, with the outside world weighing on everybody, we determined that the three of us could assemble in Hoboken without disobeying the rules laid out by Governor Murphy, and resumed . . . “practicing” hardly describes it, because we’ve done no practicing per se, and anyway what would we be practicing for . . . playing. James set up one microphone in the middle of the room in case we stumbled on something useful for the future. Instead we decided to release something we did right now.

— Ira

Listen to it below.

UPDATE (7/14): Yo La Tengo has shared a second track that was recorded from their rehearsal space. This one’s called “Georgia thinks it’s probably okay.”

UPDATE (7/15): And yet another one! This one goes by “James gets up and watches mourning birds with Abraham.” Seems like this is building up to something…

UPDATE (7/16): A fourth YLT instrumental called “Georgia considers the two blue ones” is out now.