Mystery Jets have returned with Black Sage, a new single out now via Fiction Records. It is their first new release in four years according to DIY, and NME frames it as their first major move after a six-year gap from their last studio album, 2020’s A Billion Heartbeats.
That kind of gap matters for a band like Mystery Jets, whose best records have always balanced scrappy indie-rock immediacy with a wider-eyed, slightly mystical streak. Black Sage leans into the latter without softening the former. NME describes it as arriving on a feedback-laden guitar buzz, while DIY points to reverb-drenched psych riffs and a meditation on saging, or smudging. Translation: the Jets are back in raucous mode, but the song is not just making noise for its own sake.
The track was made in collaboration with producer Leo Abrahams, whose credits include Brian Eno and Frightened Rabbit, according to NME. Blaine Harrison uses the song’s title as a doorway into something more haunted than simple comeback-single bravado. “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,” Harrison says in quotes published by NME and DIY. “But what if we are vessels for those energies, and the ghosts from our pasts have been living inside us all along?”
Harrison continues: “The message of the song is that healing is inseparable from suffering, but there is beauty to be found in the broken.” That line could scan as a press-release abstraction if the song were too polished, but Black Sage sounds more like a band trying to shake rust off by turning the volume up and trusting the room.
The writing process also points backward. Harrison says Black Sage came together from “a patchwork” of extended jam sessions where the band would “loop ideas around and improvise until we reached a kind of hypnotic flow state,” adding that they had not written that way since their earliest days. For a band entering a self-declared new chapter, that is a useful move: return to the method, not the costume.
Mystery Jets also shared a live performance filmed at the James Turrell Skyspace in Cornwall, and they are due to appear at The Maccabees’ July 31 show at Leeds’ Kirkstall Abbey alongside Maximo Park and Everything Everything. No album has been announced yet, but Black Sage is enough to make the door feel open again.