Six years since his last record, Pete Lanctot is releasing Murmuration, an album that confronts the sudden loss of a close friend. Murmuration reveals a direct and deeply personal collection of songs, departing from the storytelling of Lanctot’s previous albums and takes form as an exploration of his loss, mourning, and slow acceptance.

Murmuration traces the stages of grief across a wide swath of genres and sounds. The first track “The Ones Who Stay '' distills the underlying theme of the album with the opening lyrics “Everybody’s singing about flying away, but what about the ones who stay?”. As the title suggests, “Missing You” addresses life after loss with a simple and direct acknowledgement washed in lush synth textures. In bleak contrast to the beat of a toy drum machine, reverb drenched guitars, and the uncannily cheerful tropical-sounding backdrop of “Do Me Right”, Lanctot delves into escapism and resignation, acknowledging “It’s a sunny day again/Just like the day before/ I’m waiting for the sun to go down/ And sprawled out on the floor”.

Murmuration also features a cover of Hank Williams’ “Angel of Death”, a posthumously released 1954 demo, re-imagined as the soundtrack to a brooding cinematic spaghetti western. Sparse percussion, baritone guitar and viola writhe with melancholy underneath the death rattle duet of Lanctot and Von Schleicher’s vocals. Like a ghost caught in a windstorm of memories, the band lingers at the end of the track in a cacophony of noise only to abruptly vanish out of sight and sound.

Lanctot ultimately finds peace and some resolve in the album’s concluding track “Together for a While”, an anthem to acceptance, accountability, and the solace of finding a footing in the fleetingness of life. Over a chorus of twenty adult amatuer violinists creating a soft cloud of droning strings, Lanctot suggests an answer for the album’s initial question: “I’ll hold you and you’ll hold on to me/ And let’s forget about eternity/ Through the storms, through the rain, despite time’s persistent call/ We’re together for a while, and that’s all.”

Murmuration was recorded the first week of 2020 at Hyperballad Music in Brooklyn, where Pete, his partner and co-writer Ginger Dolden and their longtime collaborator Adam Brisbin collected some of their closest friends and favorite musicians to record the album over the course of nine days. It features the playing of Katie Von Schleicher, Joanna Sternberg, Chris Holdridge, Rick Snell and Alex Raderman as well as twenty of Pete and Ginger’s adult violin students. Mixed and completed days before the world shut down in March 2020, Murmuration sat shelved through a year-and-a-half of indecision regarding a “right time” to release an album laden with grief and loss into a world suffering through so much of both.