Blues Funeral Recordings – The desert is strong with this one!

Okay, so…

You’ve likely heard that the Elephant Tree / Lowrider split album is finally on the way this fall, and we know you’re anxious for details on that.  But bear with us.

We’ve got a ton of stuff landing during the last four months of a killer year and want to break down one more new release by a band you may not know first, because they really embody the ethic of who this label is.  (Journalists call this “burying the lead,” but we’ll try to make it worth your while to indulge us for a couple paragraphs.)

Longtime followers of Blues Funeral (and our founder’s original label MeteorCity) know that desert rock is at the heart of what we do.  Not every record we release fits in this niche, but if you know who we are and look at what we’ve done, it’s probably no surprise that Kyuss was the foundation for this label coming into being.

With that in mind, we’re stoked that after half a year pushing at the genre’s outer boundaries with phenomenal but perhaps challenging releases from Abrams, Lord Buffalo, Horseburner and delving, we’re about to drop an unwavering, 100-degree desert rock record.

Blue Heron is newer than many of our iconic roster groups, having come into being in 2018 and released their first full-length Ephemeral in 2022.  The band features two founding members of Spiritu, arguably Albuquerque, New Mexico’s first desert rock act from the early 2000s, and Ephemeral shows that all those years baking in a southwestern blast furnace did nothing but increase their titanic heft when the guys reconstituted as Blue Heron.

Following a split release with High Desert Queen in 2023, Blue Heron return this summer with their second album Everything Fades, a monolithic slab of propulsive, sun-scorched riff-heaviness that expands on their unyielding desert sound.

Full of rhythmic intensity, sledgehammer riffing and vocals ranging from clean and moody to howling and raw, Everything Fades mixes meditative atmospherics and aggressive grooves into cruising and gritty stoner romps, calling to mind echoes of Kyuss, Clutch and Monster Magnet, along with contemporaries like Valley of the Sun and Greenleaf.

This band revels in low-tuned roil and amplifier hum, and if the primordial spirit of the desert calls to you the way it does us, we think you’ll dig what Blue Heron have molded from the nuclear-blasted New Mexico sands.

Check out the title track and first single “Everything Fades” via the fun friends and fans video below (also streaming on all digital services).  If you dig what you hear, preorder the album now on sweet colored vinyl and digipak CD at Bluesfuneral.com, our Bandcamp or our Euro web shop.

All right you riff-fanatics, there’s your opening act, now for the main event.

We announced that the final release in our PostWax Vol. II series would be a split album from Elephant Tree and Lowrider roughly three years ago.  As always, PostWax subscribers get their deluxe editions first, but we’d never dream of keeping music this important from the rest of the world.

So now, at long last, the heavily-anticipated collaborative release The Long Forever will be landing in late October for fans worldwide.

It wasn’t an easy path here.  Both bands are following up incredibly beloved and highly acclaimed 2020 albums, which naturally creates a bit of expectation.  Despite that pressure, Elephant Tree and Lowrider have seized the opportunity to redefine who they are and declare where their musical voyages will go next.

Bringing these two bands onto a single platter would be an event no matter what, but the significance of this album became even greater when Elephant Tree singer/guitarist Jack Townley had a near-fatal biking accident in early 2023.

A reflection on dreaming without waking and losing all sense of time, The Long Forever takes its title from Jack’s nickname for the multi-week coma he was kept in for medical reasons before emerging and starting down the lengthy road to recovery.  That cheeky nod to what he went through only hints at the enormity of Jack’s experience, and it became the traumatic nexus around which the entire LP orbits.

In the time since their last proper albums, Lowrider has grown more complex and expressive, while Elephant Tree has embraced a rawer, set-up-the-mics-and-go approach.

The Long Forever is the gravitational singularity where they meet, drawn together to subvert and supersede expectations with a record brought into being through perseverance, healing and stubbornness of passion.

We know you’ll listen with open minds and love in your hearts.

The first single, Elephant Tree‘s “Long Forever,” is now streaming everywhere, including a retrospective video that gazes back across the band’s first ten years.

The Long Forever is available for preorder at Bluesfuneral.com, our Bandcamp or our Euro web shop on digipak CD and multiple limited vinyl variants.  There will also be a transparent ruby red vinyl edition offered exclusively for sale through independent record stores – ask at your favorite local shop to preorder from them directly, as we will not have any of these for sale through the label… unless another pandemic hits and music retail shuts down again!