Okkervil River unveil two new tracks from In The Rainbow Rain sessions

Okkervil River have unveiled two brand new tracks which didn’t quite make the cut for this year’s In The Rainbow Rain album.

“I wrote a ton of songs for the album and, in the end, chose ten that felt like they complemented each other as a whole piece,” Will Sheff explains. “Some of these songs that were very dear to me, and I was excited to get a chance to come back and put on the finishing touches.”

New Blood and Skiptracer are streaming on Spotify ahead of the band’s visit to the UK next month as part of a European tour when they’ll play shows in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester, Brighton and London. “As we worked on the song, I began to envisage it as a duet,” Sheff continues on New Blood.

“A sort of darker Islands in the Stream! Our keyboardist Sarah K. Pedinotti from Lip Talk is an incredible singer and we’ve been doing a lot of singing together onstage recently, and she and I got together and laid down the vocals near the very end of the recording process.”