Following new single ‘Bicameral’, The Range’s latest album Mercury will be out on June 10. The Vermont-based musician shared new single ‘Ricercar’.

Vermont-based musician James Hinton aka The Range has announced his first album in six years. The new album, Mercury, is scheduled for release on June 10.

The announcement comes with the release of his new single and music video, ‘Ricercar’, directed by Stevie Gee and Essy May. The latter of which is behind the album artwork.

He says of the new single,

“Ricercar  – literally –  “to search out”. A Ricercar in a musical context is a prelude fugue that kind of sets the tableau of a piece to follow. I first heard about the concept of a Ricercar in a biography of Bach, who famously encoded his own name in a piece (H having been interchangeable as the name for B-flat at the time). At the time I wrote this song I was listening to a lot of rap from the 90s, specifically DJ Premier beats. As such I was rapidly collecting breaks and had just stumbled upon the Chief Kamanawanalea break by the Turtles and found that if I reordered the sections I could make this kind of palindromic composite break that seemed to propel the song along.”
 
“This song features a vocal sample from Instagram of a singer covering Tamar Braxton’s ‘My Man.’ The lyrics are quite personal to me and are a good example of what I try to do in a lot of my songs. I tend to try to find a way to say something that I would never be able to say out loud. I think of my editing of lyrics as a pressure release.”

Building on techniques established in his 2016 LP, Potential, The Range seeks to create album that explores human connection in the Internet age.

He comments,

“I feel like I can find ways to express myself in ways that I’m too shy or unable to do in the real world.”

“Mercury is my most wide-ranging album yet. My memories of rave music, grime and MPC music are playing heavily in almost every song.”  

To celebrate the release of Mercury, The Range will be headlining Elsewhere Zone 1 in Brooklyn, NY on June 11th, more info can be found here.