Longtime transcendental folk favorites The Deer have announced a new album Do No Harm to be released November 1 on Keeled Scales / Secretly Distribution. The band share a home with the critically acclaimed indie label — Austin, Texas — where they’ve been honored by Austin Music Awards as Best Performing Folk Act and Runner Up: Best Austin Band. On the upcoming LP, it’s easy to hear why. The songs are spacious — airy vocals float atop lovely, languid melodies and gently bopping percussion, adorned with softly swelling synths and thoughtfully plucked fiddle and mandolin. It’s a sound that compels comparisons to both songwriting principals like Fleetwood Mac, Neko Case or Mazzy Star as well as indie folk contemporaries like Jade Bird, Haley Heynderickx, or Shannon Lay. The Deer have formed a breed of folk entirely uninhibited, all in all its own, and absolutely captivating.
Frontwoman Grace Rowland provided candid insight into the song’s inspiration. She says, “Tour six months out of the year and tell me you don’t re-evaluate your whole life every time you leave. My well-worn route to love and companionship had always represented only a small part of my orientation, and this song is about the changes that came about when I was able to confront it. I had been laying it out track by track for so long, but my path was full of divots and plateaus, curves and runways; it needed bridges in some places, step stones in others.”
Do No Harm gleams with the powerful cohesion known only of bands who’ve been together for years, and often through hardship. The Deer made their debut in 2013 with the tremendously tender full-length, An Argument for Observation. Shortly after, their backup vocalist Stephanie Bledsoe died tragically. In 2015 came On the Essence of the Indomitable Spirit, a stunning tribute to her memory, followed by Tempest & Rapture in 2016, an emboldened effort to move forward.
Though genre-fluidity and sonic experimentation are at the core of The Deer’s work, their upcoming LP lays down distinction with a graceful thump — a beautiful, confident conclusion of audial explorations. You can hear where they’ve been, and where they’re headed. Frontwoman Grace Rowland explains, “Since our music school days in the early 2000s, our soft-spoken, shoegazing friend Michael McLeod has been a quietly seething sea of music. We used to make recordings together when I was still in denial of my musical leanings. I whispered out some of the very first lyrics I had ever written into his (then new) collection of fancy microphones, with Jesse Dalton on bass, making the kind of stuff we liked to hear. We were rock, we were funk, we were country. We tried everything. In 2019, we’re still gathered around Michael as he sends us through different mics and moves our sounds around, detail by detail.”
TRACKLIST
1. Confetti To The Hurricane
2. Move To Girls
3. Nothing Hurt
4. Dissolve
5. Stark Raven
6. Swoon
7. Chill Veil
8. How Not To Die
9. Interstellar Frontier
10. Walking In Space
12. Walking In Space
TOUR
October 18 | Austin, TX at Antone’s
November 1 | Portland, OR at The Old Church
November 14 | Burnet, TX at UtopiaFest Eleven
PHOTO CREDIT: LETITIA SMITH
