Stream: Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, ‘Hot Coals’

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Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros at the 2015 Air + Style Festival (Photo by Zane Roessell)
Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros at the 2015 Air + Style Festival (Photo by Zane Roessell)

Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros hasn’t released any music since the summer of 2013, when their third album, a self-titled affair, came out. Since then, they have relocated to New Orleans, where Alex Ebert set up shop in a new studio and, he says, “It’s like we just turned on a new page in the old book with the inscription: ‘Serve your power and work beyond reason.’ We have.” The new song “Hot Coals,” set for a Friday release, recalls the spare, fractured folk of Devendra Banhart rather than the Magnetic Zeros’ collectivist Americana, and Ebert digs deep for weighty metaphors in the lyrics. The songs also name-checks Cimmerians — either the actual 8th century B.C. nomadic people, or the tribe referenced in Homer’s “The Odyssey,” or the fictional people of “Conan the Barbarian.” Whichever, this one is liable to, as he sings, stay in the heart. A new album is on the way next year.

||| Stream: “Hot Coals”