The Range returned with his first proper single in six years, “Bicameral,” at the end of January — it made our list of the best songs of that week — and today he’s back with news of a new album called Mercury, his follow-up to 2016’s excellent Potential. We’re also getting a new single today, “Ricercar,” another soaring track that James Hinton elaborated on in a statement:

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

Watch a video for the track below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Bicameral”
02 “1995”
03 “Urethane”
04 “Ricercar”
05 “Nor For Me”
06 “Relegate”
07 “A Tree Day”
08 “Balm”
09 “Cantor”
10 “Every Good Thing”
11 “Violet”

Mercury is out 6/10 via Domino. Pre-order it here. The Range is playing Elsewhere Zone 1 on 6/11 – tickets available starting this Friday here