Here’s your first chance to hear a brand new song from Howlin Rain’s forthcoming album, The Dharma Wheel. You can hear Dharma Wheel below, ahead of The Dharma Wheel album which will be released October 8 on Silver Current Records.
This is the sixth studio album by Howlin Rain, the California-based band formed in 2004 by Ethan Miller while he was still in noise-rockers Comets On Fire. Miller’s subsequent projects have included MOJO favourites Heron Oblivion as well as Feral Ohms, but he keeps returning to Howlin Rain.
The Dharma Wheel began to be created during Howlin Rain’s tour in support of their previous album, The Alligator Bride, in 2018. Dharma Wheel is about a World War One soldier passing from this world back into matter. The 16-minute suite was recorded at Louder Studios in Grass Valley, with keys added by Adam MacDougall (Circles Around the Sun and Chris Robinson Brotherhood).
Ahead of the release, Howlin Rain’s songwriter, guitarist and vocalist, Ethan Miller, explained, “I wanted The Dharma Wheel to be a portal from our everyday world, the one from which you stand on hard ground and hold the album in your hands and peer into the artwork, and into another universe.” He added, “We were trying to build a world big enough that the imagination won’t go soft on you after just a few listens and where our love for this music, and music in general — along with a good dose of audacity — create a magic carpet ride through the world of The Dharma Wheel.”
Listen to the new track Dharma Wheel here -
The Dharma Wheel is co-produced by Miller and Tim Green, who previously collaborated with the group on Magnificent Fiend (2008) and The Russian Wilds (2012). Green’s other credits include work with acts such as Bikini Kill, The Quails and LIES.
MOJO’s Stevie Chick described the sound of Howlin Rain’s last album, The Alligator Bride, as “Borne aloft by the strangled bottleneck passion of guitarists Miller and Daniel Cervantes, played with the soulfulness of Creedence and grounded by the romance of Miller’s poetic storytelling, spinning Springsteen-esque portraits of druggy West Coast misfits and ne’erdowells, it’s an album of sublime crescendos and melodies like warm embraces, and an elegiac closer, Coming Down, locating gospel beauty within the Hendrixian nirvana. So joyful, so tender, so warmly anthemic, its vintage moves are timeless, and irresistible.”
Preorder The Dharma Wheel album here -
