The Innocence Mission "Midwinter Swimmers" CD

New news from Innocence Mission, Pennsylvania's treasure. Magical music woven with miraculous voices and soft sounds. I want to savor the happiness of being able to experience their new sound once again.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania trio Innocence Mission will release a new album, Midwinter Swimmers. The video for the lead single, "This Thread Is a Green Street," has this to say about the band's singer-songwriter Karen Peris:

"It's like imagining the landscape as a world of doorways, where you might seek out memories or get closer in some way to someone you want to meet. It reminds me of scenes you might encounter in nature, or more mundane things like the transportive quality of sewing thread when you're mending something, a road map. One thing about recording this was how do I find this feeling in the sound, and how do I find the beauty in the memory, the half-choruses of my childhood in the 1970s. There's a nice elusive quest in recording."

Midwinter Swimmers, Innocence Mission's first studio album in four years, instantly sounds like an old friend and yet is also a new kind of adventure for the beloved Pennsylvania band of high school pals Karen Peris, Don Peris, and Mike Bitz, with both the sweeping, cinematic quality and the strange, lo-fi beauty of a newly discovered vintage folk album.

"It sounds like something recorded on Western Electric in the 1960s, reminiscent of Vashti Bunyan and Sybil Bayer, but with emotional explosions of orchestration, drums and harmonies coming in. The Innocence Mission's sound never stops getting richer," wrote one early listener and friend.

■Track list