Laura Marling has announced her eighth album, Patterns in Repeat, due out on October 25 via Chrysalis/Partisan Records. It follows 2020’s Song For Our Daughter (and her 2021 collaboration with Tunng’s Mike Lindsay as LUMP), and she wrote, recorded, and produced it in her home studio in London. Dom Monks co-produced, and it also features Rob Moose. See the cover art and tracklist below.
“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,” Laura says. “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),” she continues. “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.”
The first single is the beautiful “Patterns,” which you can hear below.
Laura has also announced a pair of intimate live residencies to support Patterns in Repeat, happening in London (Hackney Church on October 29 and 30 and November 1 and 2) and NYC (Bowery Ballroom on November 11 and 12). Those are her only upcoming dates at the moment, and tickets go on sale Friday, July 19 at 10 AM local time, with an artist presale starting Wednesday, July 17 at 10 AM local time..
LAURA MARLING – PATTERNS IN REPEAT TRACKLIST
1. Child of Mine
2. Patterns
3. Your Girl
4. No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can
5. The Shadows
6. Interlude
7. Caroline
8. Looking Back
9. Lullaby
10. Patterns in Repeat
LAURA MARLING: 2024 TOUR DATES
29th October – Hackney Church, London
30th October – Hackney Church, London
1st November – Hackney Church, London
2nd November – Hackney Church, London
11th November – Bowery Ballroom, New York
12th November – Bowery Ballroom, New York
