02/06/2026
Laura Veirs announces new album "Temple Songs" out 14th August via Raven Marching Band Records || Shares first single "Flying Into Darkness": https://youtu.be/PnCCx3981y4
Esteemed Portland, Oregon-based artist Laura Veirs today returns with the announcement of her new album Temple Songs due out 14th August via her own Raven Marching Band Records and available to preorder here. Veirs has also shared its textured, stirring lead single “Flying Into Darkness” alongside a video she filmed while on tour in France. “This song comes from a feeling of being existentially unmoored in a dark, uncertain moment. I kept circling the same questions: how do I stay grounded? How do I feel like I’m doing some real good, nudging things–even slightly–in a better direction?” Veirs explains. “At its core, the song wrestles with restlessness–how hard it is to find true rest when the world keeps us in a constant state of unease. There’s also a thread of ‘No Masters’ running through it, which shows up across the album. I’m reaching for a world shaped more by freedom and love than by greed and fear, and all the ways those forces show up in daily life: hollow work, vast inequality, systems that feel too big to push against, and the steady backdrop of violence and conflict.” Across 11 intricate, deeply human, and quietly defiant tracks, Temple Songs offers solace in solidarity. Unmistakably “Veirs-ian” yet strikingly new, the album captures a beloved songwriter three decades into her career reaching peak form. Watch the video for “Flying Into Darkness” HERE.
“This achingly beautiful album reminds us that finding inner strength during the roughest of times is perhaps the greatest act of resistance.” - Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney)
Veirs has also announced an extensive international tour beginning in the UK in September that includes a headline show at EartH in London. The UK dates are listed below and feature support from Karl Blau.
Since the 2022 release of her last studio album Found Light, Veirs has kept her days full: building a backyard studio, getting married, blending a family with four teenagers, deepening her visual art practice, and expanding her music teaching. “I didn’t know if I would write songs again,” she says. “Turns out that period was a gathering phase. When I made the commitment to recording the album myself, the muse caught me again and it came together very quickly.” Written and recorded over three months in the fall of 2025 in Veirs’ backyard ‘Temple of Bloom’ studio, her 14th solo LP marks a new level of artistic independence. While Found Light (co-produced by Veirs and Shahzad Ismaily) was a declaration of autonomy, Temple Songs goes even further: every creative decision was Veirs’ alone.
Temple Songs is the first album Veirs has written, recorded, arranged, produced, and performed entirely on her own. She plays guitars, bass, drums, tambourine, percussion, and sings vocals; the only outside contribution is saxophone by a secret special guest. She used no click tracks and no electronic instruments, working by feel and intuition while watching bamboo sway outside her studio window. At 52, Veirs has reconnected with herself through a radically new process: one that feels both fresh and profoundly earned.
Made with just two mics and a laptop in a 10’ x 14' room, Veirs embraced the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi throughout the process, choosing not to pitch-correct vocals or edit out rough edges. “I wanted to make something that sounds as organic and human as possible,” she says. Mixing by Philip Weinrobe (Adrienne Lenker) adds sympathetic finishing touches. Because the Temple of Bloom wasn’t built for recording, the studio itself became a collaborator. Veirs paused takes for rain on the skylight–or let it stay. She waited out neighbours’ conversations, raced to finish a sensitive vocal before a stump grinder roared to life, and included the presence of resident bluejays, passing crows, and other neighbourhood sounds. These ambient intrusions lend the album an intimate, lived-in authenticity. To fully realize the personal, handmade world of Temple Songs, Veirs’s longtime photographer and friend Shelby Brakken captured the front cover at Portland venue Mississippi Studios, where Veirs has played her music many times, and where she got married; the back cover and lyrics insert feature Veirs’s calligraphy, collage work, and illustrations.
Built around her delicate fingerstyle nylon-string guitar, vulnerable vocals, and bold electric guitar embellishments, Temple Songs showcases Veirs' gift for simplicity and emotional precision, while also veering into art-experimental territory (as on the compelling "Pulse," which culminates in a cacophonous duet between electric guitar and sax). Feelings of contemporary despair and futility are often offset by hope and resistance. "No Masters" is a sparse call for collective self-determination, while “Sunlight and Doom” incorporates elemental fragments from the ancient Greek lyricist Sappho.
Veirs’ influences range from Mac DeMarco’s commitment to trusting his personal taste to the anarchists and feminists of the late 1800s and their rallying cry, “no gods, no masters.” “I needed to make this album to connect more deeply with my taste, aesthetics, and confidence. I wrestled with a lot of doubt,” Veirs says. “But there were many happy accidents and eventually I found a flow—seeing the studio again, for the first time since my 20s, as a private place for exploration.”
"Flying Into Darkness" from Laura Veirs' upcoming album "Temple Songs" Pre-order album and stream: https://lnk.to/templesongsRelease date: August 14, 2026 on...
