Okkervil River reveal two new singles "New Blood" and "Skiptracer"

As Okkervil River get geared up to tour Europe in the coming weeks, the American rock band led by Will Sheff has shared two new tracks.

"New Blood" and "Skiptrace" are closely linked to their most recent In The Rainbow Rain album, having been recorded during their sessions to create the ten-track album.

On the two new tracks, Sheff elucidates, “I wrote a ton of songs for the album and, in the end, chose ten that felt like they complemented each other as a whole piece. Some of these songs that were very dear to me, and I was excited to get a chance to come back and put on the finishing touches.”

On "New Blood", Sheff reveals, “As we worked on the song, I began to envisage it as a duet – a sort of darker “Islands in the Stream”! Our keyboardist Sarah K. Pedinotti from Lip Talk is an incredible singer and we’ve been doing a lot of singing together onstage recently, and she and I got together and laid down the vocals near the very end of the recording process."

"Skiptracer" was also written in the same studio sessions for their most recent album, as Sheff explains the track, “is a kind of a cloudy and mysterious song that just more or less came out of my subconscious – it wasn’t really filtered, but it was edited - as the original demo of the song, when I was writing it, was around twenty minutes long. This version was done in a couple of takes with little embellishment, and what you hear is what we played. The song starts with Benjamin Lazar Davis’s CR-78 vintage drum machine and then he comes in on electric bass, playing an interlocking part with Sam Evian on Moog bass. Sarah plays piano whilst I play acoustic guitar and sing a live vocal. Cully plays drums against the machine. I sent it to Rob Moose and he added strings, and Saundra Williams lent her amazing vocals to the song along with Leslie Gardner and Simone Appleby, both of whom also sing on New Blood.”