Last Friday, when Sylvan Esso dropped new single “What If”—a short, silvery, heartbeat of a single—we suspected a new album was on the way. That hunch proved right today with the announcement of Free Love, the duo’s third album, which is slated for a September 25 release via Loma Vista Recordings.
The album is the first since Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn got married, and the first since they built their recording studio, Betty’s, in Chapel Hill. The pandemic has delayed the release of the album, but it also has brought more meaning to an album that, as the band wrote on its Instagram, is about “being increasingly terrified of the world around you and looking inward to remember all the times when loving other people seemed so easy, so that you can find your way back to that place.”
To tide us over until September, the band released “Ferris Wheel,” a cathartic, sweaty single about August heat. In the video, filmed during the pandemic, you’ll find Meath cavorting among spinning neon lights at an abandoned theme park in South Carolina. It’s a dream, it’s an absolute bop; it’s giving us something to get us through this long, weird, hot summer.
Watch the video for “Ferris Wheel” below.
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Nah, they got married in 2016, and their second album came out in 2017. You can tell because the picture on the cover is them at their wedding.