Italian heavy psych band Mr Bison return with ‘The Garden of Forgotten Dreams’, their new album for Heavy Psych Sounds, released September 25.

We’re premiering the full record today. The garden of the title is imagined as a place where forgotten wishes, memories and parts of ourselves can be kept until we are ready to return to them. For the band, it became a way of thinking about refuge: somewhere private enough for both the things we want to nurture and the things we are not quite ready to show anybody else.

That way of building an album around an image has been part of Matteo Barsacchi’s writing for some time. When we interviewed Mr Bison in 2022, while discussing ‘Seaward’, he told us:

“It is very helpful to have a clear idea of the image that you want to instill with your music.”

Back then, the image was the sea. Mr Bison live on the Tuscan coast, and ‘Seaward’ grew out of the landscape around them and the old story of the seven islands of the Tuscan archipelago. ‘The Garden of Forgotten Dreams’ begins somewhere rather more private, but the method is not so different. First comes the image, then the songs begin to gather around it.

That habit continued on 2024’s ‘Echoes From The Universe’, where the band turned towards questions of freedom and destiny. The new record is less concerned with mythology on that scale. Its garden is closer to home, a place for things that have been put aside but not necessarily lost.

Mr Bison themselves have changed along the way. In our 2022 interview, Barsacchi described a three-piece with no bass player, the two guitars using octave setups to cover the lower frequencies. The present band is a quartet: Barsacchi on guitar and synth, Matteo Sciocchetto on voice and bass, Davide Salvadori on guitar and synth, and Lorenzo Salvadori on drums.

That shift has happened gradually alongside the music. Barsacchi once described ‘Holy Oak’ as the point where their earlier stoner roots began opening into progressive and psychedelic territory. By ‘Seaward’, longer structures, changes in tempo and more elaborate arrangements had become central to the band.

‘The Garden of Forgotten Dreams’ carries that history with it, but there is no great need to divide the record into old Mr Bison and new Mr Bison. The eight songs belong together, from ‘Cosmic Tide’ through the title track, ‘Bright Shadow’, ‘Astray’, ‘Turn to Stone’, ‘The Sunrise’, ‘River Moan’ and closing track ‘Old Hue’.

Barsacchi wrote, composed and arranged the album, and recorded it at Blotch Recording Studio in Tuscany. Richard Behrens mixed the record at Big Snuff Studio in Berlin, with Carl Saff mastering in Chicago. ‘Bright Shadow’ was mastered separately by Adam Ayan at Gateway Mastering Studios. Kuba Sokolski created the artwork.