1995. This was the year Joan of Arc formed, rising from the ashes of the defunct Chicago act Cap’n Jazz. Two years later the band released its debut full-length and the rest was history. This is in past tense because Joan of Arc too has seen its own demise. A couple of times. Now, after say, a more than healthy catalog of albums, the band has announced the final nail in the coffin with Tim Melina Theo Bobby (Joyful Noise Recordings). The album was written and recorded by the band—Melina Ausikaitis, Bobby Burg, Theo Katsaounis, and Tim Kinsella—and featuring frequent collaborators Jeremy Boyle, Jenny Pulse, Nate Kinsella, and Todd Mattei, and is set for a December 4th, 2020 release. The band shares the first single off the album, the expansive “Destiny Revision.”

Of the new song, Kinsella explains, “‘Destiny Revision’ was a personal song when it was written a couple years ago, about winging it when your life fails to play out as you’d imagined. Unfortunately, that simple sentiment now has a much more expansive and darker resonance as all of us in America face a fascist administration using the pandemic as an opportunity to consolidate power, and we all struggle to imagine our futures.” 

Hanif Abdurraqib—poet, essayist, and cultural critic—is a witness to the Joan of Arc experience, writing in tribute, “if one listens closely enough on this album, you hear the evolution of a set of musicians, who still have so much to offer the world, even if it isn’t in this container that some of us have gotten used to hearing them in; as Good Fuck, the duo of Tim Kinsella and Jenny Pulse, or Aitis Band, the project of Melina Ausikaitis, Theo Katsaounis, and Bobby Burg. There’s a dexterity, a calm, and a maturity to the sounds running through this album that have me excited to see whatever is on the horizon.”