Sadurn return

In the wake of Sadurn announcing their much-anticipated new record, I spent some time this week with Radiator, their 2022-released debut, and a sincere favourite of mine since first discovering it at some point in the time between.

Time changes many things, I guess weather does too, the lay of the land. Listening to it this week, it all felt a little brighter and lighter than the (conjured) version of it I carry with me in my head. I remember listening to it on long drives through long summer days and evenings, I remember the quiet power of the songs, that voice, its ability to draw you deep into its bruised world. Over time, Radiator weaved itself in alongside the likes of Lomelda, Florist; work that seems to hold a sense of longing in its bones, truly coming alive when the sun begins to sink on a day that held the possibility of so much undefined.

Radiator also became a record that defied its own parameters. Loose and unpolished, its sweet country-flecked songs took root elsewhere and much farther afield, racking up millions of plays thanks, seemingly, to the lingering charm it held within, its ability to thump you in the stomach with one tender shift of voice, of guitar – a special kind of power, I found out this week, that still remains.

Announcing its follow-up a couple of week's ago via Instagram, Sadurn's G DeGroot shared some open and honest thoughts about the pressure that such sharing entails. "last time we put out a record happened to be some of the hardest most down bad moments of my little life," they said. "it just lined up that way with other things, but releasing music and being visible on the internet in a big new way added to the stress."

The album's press release clarifies things in more detail too, announcign that "after years of healing, vocal coaching, somatic therapy, and living on the road, what has emerged is a document of hard-earned catharsis."

Real joy, then, that DeGroot found a way through, uprooting those strange and knotted grips to bring new work to light. The first chapter of that return comes in the form of 'whole thing', the stirring first single, five-minutes long, and a song that feels both reminiscent of Radiator's layered tenderness while also hinting at something more expansive. The open road that helped define it is a miraged backdrop, rolling on, rolling on, and found in the melancholic sag of the voice, the words, and present too in the winding guitar solos that catch and hold the light, that drive things forward to whatever might lie beyond.

The album it's taken from is called Underworld, and will be released in October via Run For Cover. “The record was definitely born out of grief, yearning, inner conflict… I wouldn't want people to think that’s where I am now. But when you write about things, that's your way to move through them. And you can tell it took me a long time to move through them,” DeGroot says in the album's bio. “But that’s maybe the most critical part of it–we circle back to the same lessons in a spiral, as if we never learned them, and we have to make sense and beauty out of that, too.”

Thanks for being here, I hope you enjoy reading and listening.