Kevin Bronson on June 14th, 2017

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Since he departed Vampire Weekend in early 2016, singer-songwriter-producer Rostam Batmanglij, has worked with Frank Ocean and Solange and made a collaborative album with the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser. Today the 33-year-old announced that his solo album “Half-Light” would be out Sept, 8 via Nonesuch Records.

He explains the album title this way: “It wasn’t until I had almost finished this album and was trying to decide what I should call it that I took the time to look up the word ‘half-light.’ That lyric, and a large part of that song ‘Half-Light,’ had come to me in a stream of consciousness sitting in front of a piano years ago, captured in a voice memo on my phone. I had never stopped to figure out what that word meant exactly. But when I read its definition, and found that it had a double meaning — that it referred to both dawn and dusk — I started to think of how those times of day are part of so many lyrics on this album. I was also struck by the fact that it was a word with a double meaning. That felt important to this record. It made me think back to a friend in Japan who told me that the word ‘double’ was becoming more and more popular than ‘half’ for people to describe their split ethnicities. Any person growing up in America with immigrant parents experiences this dichotomy, of feeling both double and half. It’s something a lot of us who identify as queer experienced growing up as well, slipping between straight and gay worlds, code-switching. I say experienced in the past tense because I don’t know that that’s the experience today’s kids will have. Things are changing.”

Written and produced in Rostam’s L.A. home “Half-Light,” the album includes the single “Bike Dream,” a beat-driven track that’s about as clamorous as a sweet love song can be. Rostam, who playd a sold-out show at the Masonic Lodge earlier this week, will announce tour plans for the album.

||| Stream: “Bike Dream”

||| Also: Watch the video for the first single “Gwan”