School Of Seven Bells SVIIB

Excited to read that word of a new (and final) School Of Seven Bells album is going to be released. Just last week, I had posed the question to a social network as to whether anyone had heard anything. When Benjamin Curtis died (at only 35, from the rare T-Cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma), the band had announced that an album had been in the works and would likely be released. Word has come that it will come out in February. It sounds like the theme of the album covers the story of Curtis and bandmate Alejandra Deheza - of their friendship, then relationship, then friendship again.

From Stereogum:

"SVIIB closes an arc, but it’s also a final piece of art woven to remain, a way for Deheza to say all those things now. Losing a person so crucial to your life as Curtis was to Deheza’s is the kind of experience you can’t process quickly, or maybe ever, at least not totally. Eventually, though, she reached a point where she wanted to return to this record, wanted to mark what she and Curtis had done together and wanted to finish their last project.”I feel like I’ve been holding onto these songs,” she says. “It’s really wild to listen to these on the other end of … of everything that’s happened.” That’s why it’s SVIIB. “When I see those Roman numerals, I just think of an era,” she says. It’s both the final installment, and the sweeping story of everything that had happened up until that final installment. There were a lot of things Deheza had left to say about Curtis, about their time in this band together. The album’s complicated birth, from their best times to the worst, makes it what it is: a celebration and remembrance not just of Curtis as a person, but of a decade of two people’s lives, orbiting each other with the kind of intensity that most of us might not ever find."

SVIIB is out 2/2016.

1 Ablaze
2 On My Heart
3 Open Your Eyes
4 A Thousand Times More
5 Elias
6 Signals
7 Music Takes Me
8 Confusion
9 This Is Our Time