Introducing your new favorite surrealist folk outfit: Youth in a Roman Field. The project was spearheaded by multi-instrumentalist, artist, writer, and activist Claire Wellin, known for being a full-time member of the Brooklyn-based indie rock powerhouse San Fermin and her time touring with Delta Rae and Once The Musical. Musically, Youth In a Roman Field feels like if Anais Mitchell collaborated with Andrew Bird. Insightful, razor-sharp, and wildly inventive, the project channels heartbreak and rage through a hopeful lens. It feels disarmingly genuine.
Youth in a Roman Field announce their newest offering: Get Caught Trying, out November 11 on Better Company Records. With the album announcement, they share lead single ‘Nightswims.’ Stripped back and idiosyncratic, ‘Nightswims’ is a song about heartache and the deep sadness of living in present day America.
On the single, Claire Wellin shares: “I wrote ‘Nightswims’ in the fall of 2016 and winter of 2017, in my apartment in Queens. It explores the difficulties of creating and sustaining intimacy in a digitalized world, expressing the disappointment, rage, and sadness I was, and still am, feeling about the realities of life in America. I am a heavy yet restless sleeper and have had absolutely insane dreams for as long as I can remember, many of which involve water in various creative and terrifying ways. These dreams intensified during a deep, dark heartbreak that happened to coincide with the general timing of the 2016 election (haha) and have continued ever since. This is by far the darkest song from our new record, and is special as it was the breaking point from which my writing, and the rest of the album, transformed into an exploration of the thread between myself and the women who came before me, bringing healing and lightness in the process. We are now once again in a ‘darkest before the dawn’ moment, and releasing the song now is an acknowledgement that we are in pain, we are in trouble, and we will only get through it together.
“This is the only song on the new album that was recorded before the pandemic, and therefore the only song we recorded live as a band. It’s also special because there was a significant amount of structural input from each member of the band. We gathered at Virtue & Vice studios in Brooklyn, NY with my co-producer and dear friend Allen Tate and played it live for pretty much the first time that day, recording in a few hours in one room. Little did we know it’d be the last time we would record together for a very, very long time.”
