John Butler has returned with his first new music in six years, ushering in a new era with the gentle, meditative ambient track Surrender.
It's the first song released from Butler's upcoming solo album Running River, a transformative album of meditations, chants and instrumental passages. Described in a press release as "an ambient journey of relaxation and meditation", Running River will also serve as the first instalment of a four-album project dubbed The Four Seasons, which chronicles Butler's process of rebuilding creatively after he found himself at a low point.
So the story goes, Butler was burnt out after touring his last album with the John Butler Trio, 2018's Home. Compounding his stress was the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russian invasion in Ukraine, as well as the loss of his father, the ultimate disbanding of John Butler Trio, and his prolonged struggles with anxiety and weariness from long bouts of touring.
Nevertheless, Butler dove headfirst into a new album era, working to produce and engineer a traditional follow-up to Home without any third-party assistance. The process wore him down, though, and eventually he was forced to abandon the project as he felt completely listless. Surrender came from just that: in a last-ditch effort to rekindle his love for music, Butler surrendered himself to the process and started from scratch in the most elementary ways.
Reflecting on its minimalism, Butler said in a statement: "I'm always taken by how music by itself can make you feel and go to places that you can't get to through intellect. I love when the lyrics of a song pass the baton onto the music to say everything the lyrics couldn't."
Butler said of his overall inspiration for Running River, which is due out on May 24 via Jarrah Records and MGM: "I feel that life in an age of post-truth, social media and relentless data inundation, environmental, social and political strain, and - if I was not too bold to say global society collectively, at least in the west - is a bit shattered in the nervous system department."
Following the release of Running River, Butler's next album has been teased as "an instrumental offering that harks back to John's days busking on the streets of Fremantle". The third instalment of The Four Seasons will then be "solo song-driven studio recording" (which he teased back in January), while the fourth and final one will reunite him with a full backing band.
