“Kamikaze” is the final preview before the long-anticipated arrival of Lapse, the first new album in more than 13 years from groundbreaking slowcore pioneers IDAHO. Led by Laurel Canyon-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Martin since its formation in the early 90s, IDAHO has built a canon that defies the confines of indie rock, bearing the uncanny grace to stimulate equally the full spectrums of the heart and the mind, with lush, alien four-string guitar tones draped over a ragged, elegant desert-scape. Arriving with a video directed by David Schlussel (who Martin last collaborated with on 2005’s “Live Today Again” video), “Kamikaze” finds IDAHO picking up where Martin left off, with focal bass and slide guitar hovering over hushed vocals fittingly “daydreaming about a reunion with old friends,” as he sings: “How can it be this long / since I’ve seen all of you.” Lapse (Arts & Crafts) arrives Friday, May 31, 2024.

Lapse is the first new album from IDAHO since the cult indie rock band’s 2011 release, You Were A Dick. Its 10 new songs are engraved with Idaho’s long-standing signature sound: rich melancholia lavished by Martin, with bittersweet delivery on his heartfelt, cinematic music. Set against the oasis of 29 Palms, California, near Joshua Tree National Park, where it was recorded, Lapse is an album about relationships and relationships based on music – a band – for lack of a better word – still inspired by the notion of its very existence – “more of a feeling than a band” – and that its music connects deeply with a small but highly tapped-in and unflinchingly faithful audience. 

The songs of Lapse are priceless snapshots of IDAHO’s evolutionary sound captured in newfound flux – otherworldly signals from the desert, conjured from the magic of the ether; and collaboration, with newcomer guitarist Robby Fronzo joining the fray, and the return of 90s drummer Jeff Zimmitti back in the fold. 

More collaborative than anything Martin has recorded in the last 20 years – he admits that there’s “nothing like the synergy that happens when I let someone else in” – Lapse is charged with the undying love of making music and celebrates the unity of being here together. “What really brought Lapse out after all this time is the idea that as much as I may love to be alone, where I truly feel that I am myself, to be in relation to another is where one truly evolves.”