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Our new album, PORTRAITS, is mastered and ready to roll. The full album will be released on February 13th of 2025, but we’ll be releasing a few singles before that, starting right after the new year. 

PORTRAITS is a re-imagining of an album Emily Packard and Damon Waitkus recorded with some friends back in the summer of 2003. It uses the original rhythm and violin tracks, but brings new lyrics, vocals, and an array of other overdubs by present band members Kate McLoughlin and Victor Reynolds. 

PORTRAITS presents a collection of bite-sized, slice-of-life, mostly first-person portraits of individuals. You might think of them as front porch songs: hooky, energetic, sunny-side-up, reflective, fun, a little casual. Pure play and pleasure. It’s a side of Jack O’ the Clock that has always been present but has never been so concentrated in a single album, and because of the strange decade-spanning way this album came together, could never quite happen again. We look forward to sharing it with you soon!

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It’s ironic to be releasing this song now, when a fire ban is in effect in our area of the Northeast and ponds are drying up. When I wrote “Windigo Knocking,” it seemed it would never stop raining. The summer had been so wet that a lot of the sugar maples that are emblematic of the area didn’t display any fall colors, collapsing instead into a sickening green-black. Drought or flood, it comes to the same thing: the season is sick.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer evokes the Anishinaabe legend Windigo, a hunger-wracked monster that haunts the margins of winter encampments in lean times, frozen-hearted and insatiable. “Born of our fears and our failings,” Kimmerer writes, “Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than anything else.” Windigo represents a system out of balance—its hunger only begets more hunger; its isolation from the group only deepens as it tries to interact with it forcibly and destructively.

Listen now on Bandcamp or Spotify.

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Suddenly, we’re playing several shows in quick succession! If you’ve been waiting, now’s your chance.

First, we’ll be playing a house show August 18 at 2:00PM in Manchester, Vermont. Please let us know directly if you’d like to attend.

Next, we are very excited to announce that we’ll be playing at the Sonic Circus Festival on August 24th. This is a fun, free, outdoor festival in Marlboro, VT. We’ll play at 3:15. Come share some Jamaican food with us!

And of course, we can’t wait to travel down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to play at this year’s ProgDay Festival on August 31.

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The Warm, Dark Circus has made it into several lists for best albums of 2023!

#1 on Prog Archives across all genres and locations

An “Album of the Year” on Avant Music News

Avant Music News Best of 2023: Part II – Albums of the Year

#3 on Pienemmat Purot

Year by Year : Best Albums of 2023

#5 on the Eppy Gibbon podcast

#8 on Prog is Alive

#13 on the Curve Ball Podcast

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The Warm, Dark Circus is now available on Spotify and other streaming services, as well as Bandcamp and Wayside Music for physical CDs.

Check out an extensive interview with Damon in Pienemmät Purot about the new album, influences, latest news on the band, and much more!

Press Highlights

“Picture a dark chest of drawers with no indication of what is stored inside each one of them…The Warm, Dark Circus continues the band’s journey through a carefully crafted musical landscape wherein the signposts can be deceptive but always point to something interesting and adventurous.” — Here Comes The Flood

“really rich and downright head-spinningly complex, yet seductively addictive” — Pienemmät Purot

“like a fiction anthology that picks at reality with poignancy and disturbing insight….Musically…The Warm, Dark Circus stands out as one of their best…It is as if they have captured the characteristics of the last 75 years of Western music and reprocessed them into a new genre.” — Avant Music News

“…beautiful acoustic instruments working together with a top-notch rhythm section to produce a wonderful kind of modern art music…I find myself enjoying listening to it so much that it gets to the end without me having written a word…” — Exposé

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The Warm, Dark Circus available on Bandcamp and Wayside Music! The album will be available on streaming services November 17.

Jack O’ the Clock will be celebrating the release with a show in Vermont on October 27. Please inquire at jackotheclock17@gmail.com for the addresses.

A kaleidoscopic trip through the anxieties and possibilities of the present moment, the new album ranges through some of the weirdest, heaviest landscapes we’ve ever visited. Containing two epics that have been under construction as long as the band has been in existence alongside a handful of newer studio creations, it is the culmination of many years of experimentation and refinement lyrically and musically, a musical palimpsest.

Damon Waitkus – vocals, guitars, hammer dulcimers, piano, flutes, etc.
Emily Packard – violin, viola
Jason Hoopes – bass
Jordan Glenn – drums, accordion, synth
Kate McLoughlin – bassoon
Thea Kelley – vocals
Victor Reynolds – guitars, recorders, harmonica, vocals, etc.
Ivor Holloway – saxophones
Jon Russell – clarinets
Keith Waters – baritone saxophone
Karl Evangelista – electric guitar
Art Elliot – piano
Josh Packard – cello
Ben Spees – microtonal guitars
Myles Boisen – pedal steel