Anna Meredith Announces New Album ‘DARLING’ for February
The 11-track album arrives via Mercury KX, with new single and video ‘Dusky’ available now.
Anna Meredith has announced DARLING, her first studio album since 2019’s Mercury Prize-nominated FIBS, due February 12, 2027, via Mercury KX. She has also released the opening track and first single, “Dusky,” alongside a video created by Ewan Jones Morris. The 11-track album will be available digitally, on CD and standard vinyl, and as a limited-edition double “Flumps Pink” 12-inch vinyl set, with music across three sides and an etching on side D.
Meredith described the project as a response to feeling overwhelmed by both her own circumstances and the wider world. “This is me making music to summon motion, tension and release, to push through my brain and my body at a time when my own world (and the world in general) feels overwhelming,” she said. She added that the tracks are longer and simpler than those on her previous albums, with an emphasis on balancing detailed composition with openness.
“Dusky” takes listeners through four distinct sections, each setting up the next. Meredith wrote much of the track around the idea of building toward a heavy electric guitar riff for bandmate Jack Ross, working backward from that moment to find an unexpected route into it. The piece also incorporates polyrhythms, brass, metric modulations and synthesizers. “It makes me whoop with the joy and silliness of it every time,” she said.
Jones Morris built the accompanying video from handmade elements, including plasticine figures and shapes cut out with a scalpel, mounted on sticks and puppeteered before being assembled digitally. Its curtains and doors grew out of a conversation with Meredith about moving through portals into increasingly unexpected rooms. He also introduced faces to suggest different emotional states as the track progresses, giving each section a corresponding visual shift.
Alongside her recording work, Meredith has continued composing for film and television. Her screen credits include Eighth Grade, Living With Yourself, The End We Start From and TUESDAY. She also composed the score for the forthcoming feature Wicker, starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård. Her work spans contemporary classical composition, electronics and band performances, with commissions for both the First Night and Last Night of the BBC Proms.
