The Somnambulist return with ‘September Shoals’, their first new song since the 2022 album ‘Some More Songs Lost in Themselves’ and the first taste of a new EP due early next year.

We’re premiering the video today, a day ahead of the single’s official release on September 25.

The new track brings in Luc Van Lieshout of Tuxedomoon on trumpet, alongside pianist Marius Moritz and double bassist Sofia Eftychidou. The Tuxedomoon connection feels especially apt, given how often their name has followed The Somnambulist around over the years.

There is another nice bit of continuity here too. When we spoke with Marco Bianciardi in 2022, he described The Somnambulist as working “more like a jazz collective than a rock band”, and mentioned that Moritz had already recorded new material with them. Four years later, he turns up again on ‘September Shoals’.

The song also reaches back towards the jazzier side of the band’s earlier work, particularly ‘Sophia Verloren’, although it does not sound like an attempt to recreate that period.

Lyrically, ‘September Shoals’ is about keeping something to yourself for somebody else’s sake. The question underneath it is whether silence can sometimes be an act of love, even when the person leaving may never know why you chose not to speak.

Bianciardi takes that idea into the video as well.

Shot from a first-person point of view, it plays with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, only here the roles and outcome are shifted. Orpheus follows rather than leads, and Eurydice is not pulled back into the underworld. She simply gets too far ahead to be reached.

Bianciardi directed and filmed the video himself in one continuous take using a VR180 camera. Dancer and actor Elisa Bartoli appears on screen, walking with him through an abandoned landscape on a warm September day.

“It was also a kind of game for me: chasing the most beautiful light, the right timing, taking chances,” Bartoli recalls.

She describes the shoot as something that briefly seemed to slip away from ordinary time, with the sound of stones under their feet being one of the few things keeping it grounded.

“I would have kept walking for hours, but we would have lost that magical September light.”

For a band that has changed shape repeatedly over the years, ‘September Shoals’ feels quite natural. In our earlier interview, Bianciardi spoke about The Somnambulist as something that had to keep changing simply because people and circumstances change with it. That still seems to be the case.