Mystery Jets return with new single ‘Black Sage’ after six years away

Mystery Jets have returned with ‘Black Sage’, their first new single in six years. The track is out now via Fiction Records and marks a new phase for the Twickenham band, who last released a studio album in 2020 with A Billion Heartbeats.

Made with producer Leo Abrahams, whose credits include Brian Eno and Frightened Rabbit, the song opens with a wall of feedback-heavy guitar before locking into a loud, churning psych-rock shape. Blaine Harrison sings: “The remedy is in the poison / The blessing is in the curse / Cuz beauty lies in the broken / And the cracks allow the light through us”.

Harrison said the title refers to a plant used in indigenous smudging ceremonies. “For centuries, black sage has been used by indigenous communities in smudging ceremonies, where the smoke is believed to clear away negative energies or unwanted spirits. But what if we are vessels for those energies, and the ghosts from our pasts have been living inside us all along?” he said.

He added that the song is about the link between pain and recovery. “The message of the song is that healing is inseparable from suffering, but there is beauty to be found in the broken. Some songs arrive all at once, but ‘Black Sage’ came to life by stitching together a patchwork of extended jam sessions, where we’d loop ideas around and improvise until we reached a kind of hypnotic flow state, allowing the song to reveal to us what it wanted to become. We’ve not written that way since the very earliest days of the band, so we knew it had to be the first track to share from this new chapter”.

In 2022, bassist Jack Flanagan launched a solo career with the album Rides The Sky, which included the psychedelic single Skyhorse X Skyhorse.

Mystery Jets’ recent run includes A Billion Heartbeats and the lockdown covers set Home Protests, also released in 2020. The band said the latter was recorded at home during the pandemic, and featured lo-fi versions of nine songs covering topics including discrimination, homelessness, war, consumer capitalism and environmental destruction.

They are also due to play The Maccabees’ show at Leeds’ Kirkstall Abbey on July 31, alongside Maximo Park and Everything Everything.