Islands Ski Mask

Islands are following up last year's A Sleep & a Forgetting with a new full-length. It's called Ski Mask, it features the awesomely disturbing artwork above, and it's due this September via Nick Thorburn's label Manqué. The band have also shared the first single from the album, "Wave Forms."

Here's what Thorburn said about the album in a press release:

“This record is really about being angry. For better or worse, this record kind of sums up my experience thus far with being in a band. I feel like we’re kind of at a crossroads and this record is kind of me just declaring forfeiture in some ways. Like the third act of a movie—just after it seems like all hope is lost, that’s when the big breakthrough moment happens. For Islands, this is us waiting for the breakthrough moment.”

“This record is kind of a culmination of all the different things we’ve done over the years. It’s basically a melting pot of all those sounds. So much of this record is about identity—specifically, the quest for finding out your own identity. ... All of these feelings and ideas that have been bubbling up over the course of four previous albums finally came to the surface on this one. This record is like a summation of Islands, everything we’ve ever done distilled into one record. It’s basically an essential introduction to Islands—it’s everything we’ve ever been about.”

01 Wave Forms
02 Death Drive
03 Becoming the Gunship
04 Nil
05 Sad Middle
06 Hushed Tones
07 Here Here
08 Shotgun Vision
09 Of Corpse
10 We'll Do It So You Don't Have To
11 Winged Beat Drums