Ghostly International will release Telefon Tel Aviv‘s fourth album, Dreams Are Not Enough, in September. 

The nine-track album is Telefon Tel Aviv’s first since 2009’s Immolate Yourself, and the first record by Josh Eustis under the moniker after the sudden passing of founding member Charlie Cooper in 2009 ceased the project, presumably forever. 

In the decade since, Eustis has performed with, produced, mixed, and mastered countless artists, among them Nine Inch Nails, Puscifer, and Apparat, in addition to his own solo and collaborative work in Sons Of Magdalene and Second Woman. But years of reflection and processing gradually seeded in him a desire to revive Telefon Tel Aviv with a fourth album.

The album’s track titles relate to a recurring dream that’s haunted Eustis since childhood, based on a murky incident during a family vacation to a remote Alabama coastline when he was eight. In the dream, he swims alone through the waves past the sandbar to where the ocean shelf abruptly drops away into a gradient of infinite darkness, and he peers into the depths and sees himself down at the bottom, mouth open and eyes blank, standing motionless like a corpse.  

We’re told that an undercurrent of eerie melancholy flows through the album, manifested in shivering widescreen meditations, depressive twilit modern pop, and devotional industrial abstractions. 

Eustis speaks of wanting Dreams Are Not Enough to evoke a “sense of emptiness, of cutting unnecessary elements from each mix, to convey this as a solitary work—framing an absence.” It’s intended as “a document as much of what’s not there as what remains.” 

Dreams Are Not Enough LP lands September 27, with “standing at the bottom of the ocean” streaming in full below. 

Tracklisting

01. I dream of it often:

02. a younger version of myself,

03. standing at the bottom of the ocean; 

04. arms aloft,

05. mouth agape,


06. eyes glaring,

07. not seeing,

08. not breathing,

09. still as stone in a watery fane.