Dan Snaith will release Suddenly, his seventh album as Caribou, in February.

The announcement of Suddenly follows “Home,” Caribou’s first track in five years, out in October, and Caribou’s last album, Our Love, released in 2014.

Whereas Our Love provided an open-armed exploration of the concept of love in its grandest form, both as an expression of gratitude to his fans and as an examination of that one thing that matters most in life, Suddenly takes that concept and winnows it down, directly applying it to real life and the people to whom that love means the most.

The title refers to the moments of dramatic and unexpected change that occur at points in any life and within any family, universal themes that catch you off guard and change your life in a heartbeat.

As with previous Caribou albums, Suddenly was mined from hundreds of draft ideas, this time over 900. “I record music every day, and I love it—as much or more than I have always done. I feel very lucky—the thrill has never, ever left me,” Snaith says.

There is a moment where the daunting piling up of rough ideas morphs into an album quickly taking shape. “For the last few albums at least, there’s been a point about three-quarters of the way through where I work late into the night (as usual), but when I try and go to bed, ideas keep forcing me to get up and go back to the studio again,” Snaith recalls. “It happens over and over in one night. I can feel the gears whirring as I lie there trying to sleep, and I can’t ignore the ideas for fear that it will be gone when I wake up the next morning.”

In support of today’s announcement, Snaith has shared a new single, “You and I.”

Speaking of the track, Snaith says: “‘You and I’ was one of the first tracks on the album that I started, and one of the last tracks I finished; it existed in some form or other throughout the whole arc of making the record. It also captures a lot of what the record, and the title of the album, are about—the track changes suddenly and unpredictably, and it is about a change in my life that happened out of the blue.”

Art direction and photography is by Jason Evans, with design by Matthew Cooper.

Suddenly will be released via Merge Records on February 28, 2020. Meanwhile, you can pre-order here and stream “You and I” below.

Tracklisting

CD

01. Sister
02. You and I
03. Sunny’s Time
04. New Jade
05. Home
06. Lime
07. Never Come Back
10. Filtered Grand Piano
11. Like I Loved You
12. Magpie
13. Ravi
14. Cloud Song

LP

A1. Sister
A2. You and I
A3. Sunny’s Time
A4. New Jade
A5. Home
A6. Lime
A7. Never Come Back Side
B1. Filtered Grand Piano
B2. Like I Loved You
B3. Magpie
B4. Ravi
B5. Cloud Son