Mystery Jets have shared Soul River, the latest song from their upcoming album A Hole To See The Sky Through. NME reports that the record is due August 21 via Fiction Records, and the band's official preorder hub confirms the new album date. After Black Sage and the title piece opened this cycle with a more cosmic psych-rock angle, Soul River moves toward something quieter and more exposed.
The new song is written in memory of a close family friend from the band's Eel Pie Island orbit. NME says Mystery Jets describe that person as a guardian spirit of the community, and the band frame the track as a tribute rather than spectacle. "The song is a celebration of a life cut short but one which lives on in our memory and our music," Blaine Harrison and co. said in the announcement.
That restraint matters. Mystery Jets have always had a communal streak, but Soul River seems to put that instinct in direct contact with grief, memory, and the fragile mythology of a place. The album title comes from Yoko Ono's minimalist work A Hole To See The Sky Through, and NME's earlier report says the record uses the original artwork with Ono's permission. The cover's cutout logic fits the way this rollout keeps returning to absence as a physical thing.
A Hole To See The Sky Through follows the band's 2020 album A Billion Heartbeats. NME reports that the new album was recorded with producer Leo Abrahams at his East London HQ after being written in the years since that last studio record. The publication also frames the album around freedom, forgiveness, trauma, and wisdom, a set of themes that Soul River makes feel less abstract than lived-in.
Mystery Jets also have UK and Ireland dates on the calendar, with their official site listing a November run that includes SWG3 Studio Warehouse in Glasgow, O2 Forum Kentish Town in London, and the Academy Green Room in Dublin. That gives Soul River a clear job in this album cycle: it slows the room down, pulls the band's big-picture language into human scale, and makes the next Mystery Jets record feel less like a comeback cycle than a memorial space with guitars around it.