Borrowing from frail and desolate country tones, "When I Pass Through Here" is a distinctly American outing punctured by faint slide riffs and trembling, dust-encrusted chords. Although indebted to tones from o'er the Pond, Shields doesn't pilfer all his ideas from there; waves of reverb, lo-fi pop vocals, and muddied layers of noise all melt into the fray to create something that's deliriously dislocated from any one source or genre.
The track is the latest taste of upcoming LP Passover - the follow up to 2016's Pocketknife - which assembles a collection of "interlocking short stories" written while staying at his family home following the passing of his grandmother. Grief, religion, ceremony, family, mortality, and more are explored throughout the intensely intimate LP.
"Amidst the studio sessions for Passover it became apparent that this song’s message of confronting and shedding our regrets, in order to become a better person and make a positive mark on the world - however small that may be - fitted in perfectly within the album’s narrative," explains Shields.
Passover was recorded with Daniel Paton and Ben Reed (Frank Ocean) at London's Holy Mountain with Misha Hering.
