On August 31, The Clientele will release Minotaur, a mini-album featuring eight new songs. Minotaur will be available on limited-edition CD and digital download.

Minotaur, The Clientele’s sixth release, does not, as it is so easy to suggest, mark the end of a lost decade, for The Clientele have never been “lost,” nor does it mark a life at the edges of material success or debilitating failure. Through whispers, Minotaur reminds us that The Clientele’s truth waits within a geographic poetry, that The Clientele are of the edges. Minotaur enables us to read their albums as rain-soaked maps from a decade of exploration. A journey into the nebulous, into the eeriness between the edges of the dying village and the new estate, between the unknowable edges of the city and the sanctuary of the marshes, the places where dreams and fears replace street signs and nothing can ever be “ordinary.” If walking, as Iain Sinclair has suggested, across such terrain “confirms identity,” then Minotaur reasserts The Clientele’s skewed, bucolic visions.

These songs, from the caress of the title track through the Television-esque tensions of “Jerry” (“Am I afraid? Are you afraid?”), to undoubtedly one of The Clientele’s most beautiful pieces, “Nothing Here Is What It Seems,” are the falling leaves, the turning ashes of the “Bonfire Sessions.”

Download an mp3 of “Jerry” now, and order The Clientele’s most recent full-length Bonfires on the Heath on CD and LP in the Merge store. Get your tickets now for The Clientele on tour in September!

The Clientele on Tour:
Sep-06 Seattle, WA TBA
Sep-07 Portland, OR Doug Fir
Sep-09 Oakland, CA  New Parish
Sep-10 San Francisco, CA  Independent
Sep-11 Los Angeles, CA Echoplex
Sep-12 San Diego, CA Casbah