'The Courage Of Others' will be out on February 1.

The Texan-based band will also be playing a small number of dates in the run up to the album's release, with further UK shows planned for mid-February set to be announced soon.

The tracklisting of 'The Courage Of Others' is:

'Acts Of Man'
'Winter Dies'
'Small Mountain'
'Core Of Nature'
'Fortune'
'Rulers, Ruling All Things'
'Children of the Grounds'
'Bring Down'
'The Horn'
'The Courage of Others'
'In The Ground'

Midlake play:

Newcastle The Cluny (January 22)
Leicester The Musician (23)
Cambridge Junction2 (24)
Norwich Arts Centre (27)
London Tabernacle (28)

It's been more than three years since we've heard a new album from the gently rocking Texas quintet Midlake. Early next year, they'll return with album number three, The Courage of Others. The album will drop on February 2 via Bella Union (February 1 in the UK and Europe). That's the cover above, and we've got the tracklist below. Americans should be good and ready to hear a song called "Winter Dies" on Groundhog Day.

A press release from Bella Union claims that the new album will swap out the 70s soft-rock vibe of its predecessor, 2006's much loved The Trials of Van Occupanther, for a more traditional folk influence. In a statement, guitarist Eric Pulido says, "We didn't want to make the same album as Van Occupanther, so we carried on moving and creating and pushing for a newer sound and emotion."

Just before the album's release, Midlake will play a quick run of shows in the American South and in the UK. We've got those dates below. Later in the year, they'll play SXSW and tour more extensively.

The Courage of Others:

01 Acts of Man
02 Winter Dies
03 Small Mountain
04 Core of Nature
05 Fortune
06 Rulers, Ruling All Things
07 Children of the Grounds
08 Bring Down
09 The Horn
10 The Courage of Others
11 In the Ground

Midlake:

01-05 Baton Rouge, LA - Spanish Moon
01-06 Tallahassee, FL - Engine Room
01-07 Orlando, FL - The Social
01-08 St. Augustine, FL - Cafe Eleven
01-09 Mt. Pleasant, SC - Village Tavern
01-10 Asheville, NC - Grey Eagle
01-11 Memphis, TN - Hi-Tone
01-12 Little Rock, AR - Rev Room
01-22 Newcastle, England - The Cluny
01-23 Leicester, England - The Musician
01-24 Cambridge, England - Junction2
01-27 Norwich, England - Arts Centre
01-28 London, England - Tabernacle

beyond pumped. last record ruled. been waiting forever for this.

Very happy to hear this. The last album was brilliant.

sweet

great winter music

Midlake's Tim Smith Talks New Album

"I hate to take forever. We certainly weren't just sitting at home just watching 'Tyra'."

For someone who deals in complex, melodically rich music, Midlake frontman Tim Smith is a remarkably humble dude. On Midlake's 2006 breakout album The Trials of Van Occupanter, the Denton, Texas-based band tinkered with the 70s radio rock of Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac, turning big sounds into private pleasures. On next year's The Courage of Others, the band pulls a similar trick with the lush, haunted folk music of Nick Drake and Fairport Convention.

It's a big but organic departure from the music that brought Midlake to bubbling-over status. But to hear Smith tell it, it's not a calculated evolution; it's just what they felt like doing at the time. Last week, Pitchfork spoke with Smith about the album, which is due February 1 in the UK and Europe and February 2 in North America via Bella Union.

Pitchfork: Your new album is out in three months. How are you feeling about it?

Tim Smith: Pretty good. We're just rehearsing it now. We've added two guys to our live show. There will be seven of us on stage. It should be fun; there's a little more improvisation.

Pitchfork: What does adding guys do to the dynamic of the band? Are they people you've known for a while?

TS: Yeah, they're really good guys. One of them is a really good piano player. But since there's so much flute on the album, he's picked up flute in the last three months, and he's getting pretty good. And we have a guy who we met when we were recording the album, just to help us out with some of the album stuff on electric guitar. He's going to be playing live with us. I think it will be fun traveling with these guys. We all get along.

Pitchfork: And you're going to improvise more on stage?

TS: Yeah, in a way. We're not a jam band or anything, but certainly in the past we had had very worked-out parts for different keyboard sounds, or we would cue a sample for a violin, or play a MIDI flute, something ridiculous like that. Now we actually have a real flute. We don't have all of the keyboards anymore; it's mostly guitars. And I think everyone's gotten a lot better at their instruments. It will change slightly from night to night-- probably not a whole lot, but there is that room to be a little bit freer with these newer songs.

Pitchfork: The new songs seem like they would lend themselves to that improvisation. You've got all these melodic bits and pieces weaving in and out of each other.

TS: Right, you can just kind of make up whatever you want over the chord, and it just kind of works out.

Pitchfork: Did you head into this new album with the intention of doing something different?

TS: It just evolved that way. I don't just change for the sake of changing; I'm really never satisfied with where we're at. I'm satisfied with this album, but I already know that the next time we're going to do better. So it's not a matter of needing to change to find a different sound so that people will think we're evolving as a band. I don't care about that. I just wasn't happy anymore. As much as I love "Roscoe", I just didn't want a whole other album of "Roscoe". It just happened because of what we were listening to at the time; your tastes just change.

Pitchfork: What were you listening to?

TS: We got into British folk. We started listening to Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and Pentangle; those are the three biggies. Strawbs, Amazing Blondel, a lot of more obscure bands: Yellow Autumn, Windy Corner. A lot of Pentangle. I had never listened to that stuff before. Just like before the previous album, I had never checked out Neil Young or Joni Mitchell or anything. So the same thing sort of happened, but with British folk.

Pitchfork: How did you get into that stuff?

TS: I think just from the blog sites, where you can download albums for free-- just checking out a lot of out-of-print stuff. It's a great way to learn about new bands.

Pitchfork: Or really old bands.

TS: Yeah.

Pitchfork: What was it about British folk that drew you in?

TS: I don't know. I've always had an affinity for older sounds, older things, whatever it be-- film or furniture or whatever-- but there's something in British folk. Maybe it's the medieval types of sounds that come out of the British folk that I like. I'm really into the, as I call it, "fair maiden" quality in music, a more enchanted kind of thing rather than a bluesy, down home kind of thing. I go for more the European kind of things than the Texan kind of things.

Pitchfork: Have you always been into that stuff? Did you go to Renaissance fairs in high school or anything?

TS: I played saxophone when I was younger, in high school and college, and got a degree in it for jazz. I was always into jazz. It's hard to say, I didn't really listen to much. I mean, I was out of college before I even heard Björk or Radiohead. I got into a label called ECM. Being a jazz musician, that kind of sound was the closest thing to rock, with the straight eights and a bit of that kind of longing sense to the music that I really liked and connected with.

Pitchfork: Do you think having a background in jazz plays a part in the music you're making now?

TS: I'm sure in some way it does, although I've simplified a lot in the songwriting process. What I care about in music is the showing off of your abilities, not that I have any. But there are some trained musicians in the band, some really good musicians, and it can help us to just joke around sometimes. We have some jokes about playing jazz. We might goof off a bit, but I don't know if it really comes into play in what we're doing now. It might come into play in what we're doing now. It can certainly help, but it's hard to say where it comes in.


Obviously you studied, so you know your instrument. You studied pitches, the relation between the notes. You can hear intervals, so that makes improvising a lot easier; you've improvised a million times at a million gigs. It's a lot easier to come up with melodies on the spot; you're not as limited. But at the same time, it can hinder you; you might not think something is as cool. Someone else might be playing something really beautiful, but you would never play it because you think it's too simple. So it can hinder you, once you have that knowledge.

Pitchfork: Do you have an aversion to playing music that's too simple?

TS: Not anymore. A lot of these songs are pretty simple.

Pitchfork: Is that something that you had to get over?

TS: Yeah, I did. In the beginning, I was just stuffing as many chords as I could get in there, trying to think up new chord progressions. It's really ridiculous. All the great ones have been taken, and all you can do is use those great ones, because they're great.

Pitchfork: You tend to take a relatively long time between albums. Are you planning to tour this album for a while again?

TS: Yeah, the last album toured for about a year and a half. During that time, I was writing stuff whenever I could. I would write for the next album. This time, I would think we'd go out on the road for at least a year, and I'll do the same; I'll try to write. I feel like I've heard more and more and more music over the past couple of years, so I feel a little more solid in what I would like to do for the future. It does take us a long time; the first year of recording this one was kind of a learning process for us. None of us had checked out any of these bands. So I would come in, and say, "You have to check this out. Do you hear how the guitar is playing?" And it starts to grow on us.

We start to get into this other world, and that just took a long time. I had old songs that we would try to make kind of fit into that style, and it just wasn't happening. It took us months and months to realize that we just needed new songs that are in the style. So for the first year, we didn't get anything that you hear on the album. It was the first year, almost to the day, that we got the song "Acts of Man". That was our first one, and it set the tone for what the album could be. But once we got that, everything came within the next year, just like on our first and second album.

I don't know; I wish it were faster. I hope in the future it will be faster, and I hate to keep people waiting if they're really into what we do. I hate to take forever. We certainly weren't just sitting at home just watching "Tyra". I like that show.

Pitchfork: You talk about learning about music online and picking up influences that way. Usually when people talk about the influence that the internet has had on how we hear music, it's about how it makes everything move a whole lot faster. And you don't necessarily process everything you hear completely; you don't live with the music for as long. But you're actually working really hard on this stuff for a whole year before landing on what you want to do with this album. Have you been ever been overwhelmed, like, "Oh, there are five Pentangle albums I haven't heard"?

TS: Yeah, to a certain point. I've started collecting so much of that music. I really feel like it's a good learning tool for me. And even if it was just one pass-through of listening to it, you get the sense. You know what that band is about, and you get more confident in what you yourself could say. I think it's really great to listen to as much music as possible if you're a musician and you're trying to write. I know some people like to close themselves off; they don't want to have any outside influence. But I don't know, it's a really nice thing for me.

We would just check out as much as possible, and a lot of it would be crap, really. It wouldn't be something I would want to listen to again. But it's just like, "Pass. Maybe I'll come back to it in several months, and maybe I'll appreciate it more." A lot of it was not the best music, but the things that did stick really stuck. We spent a lot of time really checking it out, and everyone was pretty familiar with a certain group of songs. We'd make a playlist, and it was like, OK, this is what we're kind of drawing from. We're all in tune to the same songs, and we all acknowledged "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" or "Fotheringay" are great songs.

Is this about Lost?

just heard Acts of Man and Rulers, Ruling All Things

the second one sounds a lot like Roscoe, at least the intro

Acts of Man is great.

Where did you hear it?

both new songs that leaked are solid... not amazing, but i like the overall vibe/production a lot

for people who didnt checked them yet:

listened to Acts of Man like 50 times since the leak

Last album was lovely, and live they were wonderful. Hope they do a longer UK tour of some small venues

leaked

yeah, can't wait

it's only 160kps, though, correct? I'll be waiting.

yes
the quality is not as bad as it sounds though