Following the announcement of their fourth full-length album Along the Lethe, Brooklyn duo Beacon shares another new single with the incredible “Pay My Debts.” The song is emblematic of the effortless genre-blending heard across the upcoming record: thick R&B grooves sashay through incandescent synth hooks and a tactile, rhythmic atmosphere. Their latest release conveys a core theme from Along the Lethe, with lyrics that reckon with guilt and absolution in some of the band’s catchiest vocal melodies to date, while its weighty R&B cuts shapes out of the thick atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the latest single is accompanied by a surreal animated music video from director Boy Tillekens, in a journey that takes them from idyllic banks of a motionless river to a billowing plume of dark smoke across the horizon. Talking on the video, the director states: “I was picturing a Thomas Hart Benton painting coming to life. Kind of treating the landscapes as if it’s a character itself – quite surreal, a bit Lynchian.”

Beacon wrote Along the Lethe, during the time of extreme uncertainty in the pandemic, with the band explaining: “I was haunted by this feeling of history intruding on our reality as lockdown descended on NYC, I was reading a book called The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth about the apocalyptic aftermath of the Norman Invasion of England in 1066, written in a ‘shadow tongue’ combining old and modern English. This uncanniness followed me through the pandemic.” Composed and produced largely in quarantine, Along the Lethe is an album as much about the allure of forgetting tragedy as it is the need to maintain our connections to the past. It’s no stretch to say Along the Lethe is Beacon’s most eclectic, expansive album to date. As Jacob describes it, “It feels like a record without restraints.”

Along the Lethe arrives on September 9th, 2022 on the band’s imprint, Apparent Movement.

Photo Courtesy: BJARNE X TAKATA