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Mystery Jets return with raucous new single Black Sage after six years away
Mystery Jets return with Black Sage, a feedback-heavy new single made with Leo Abrahams and their first new chapter in six years.
Mystery Jets are back. After a six-year absence, the Twickenham band have returned with “Black Sage”, a jagged, feedback-soaked new single that arrives via Fiction Records and points to a fresh chapter for the group.
The track was made with producer Leo Abrahams, whose credits include Brian Eno and Frightened Rabbit, and it wastes no time getting to work. Built on a snarling guitar buzz, “Black Sage” leans hard into psych rock tension while Blaine Harrison cuts through with lines about poison, blessing and damage: “The remedy is in the poison / The blessing is in the curse / Cuz beauty lies in the broken / And the cracks allow the light through us.”
Harrison has described the song as being tied to the idea of black sage, a plant used in indigenous smudging ceremonies to clear away negative energies or unwanted spirits. He pushes that idea somewhere more unsettling, asking what happens if those energies do not leave at all. “But what if we are vessels for those energies, and the ghosts from our pasts have been living inside us all along?” he said.
The frontman also framed the song as a statement about healing and pain being inseparable, saying: “The message of the song is that healing is inseparable from suffering, but there is beauty to be found in the broken.” He added that “Black Sage” came together differently from most Mystery Jets songs, built from extended jam sessions, looping ideas, and improvisation until the band reached what he called a “hypnotic flow state.” It was, he said, the first track from this new era that they had to share because it came from a way of writing they had not used since the band’s earliest days.
The release follows a relatively quiet stretch for the group, though not a complete disappearance. In 2022, bassist Jack Flanagan launched his solo career with Rides The Sky, which featured the psychedelic single “Skyhorse X Skyhorse”.
Mystery Jets last released a studio album in 2020 with A Billion Heartbeats, their sixth LP. NME gave the record four stars at the time, noting that its protest songs and celebration of the NHS marked a new identity for the band as they entered the decade.
That same year, they also released the covers album Home Protests. Recorded during lockdown, it found the band making lo-fi live versions of nine songs spanning five decades, with material touching on discrimination, homelessness, war, consumer capitalism and environmental destruction.
The band are set to appear at The Maccabees’ show at Leeds’ Kirkstall Abbey on July 31, where they will play alongside Maximo Park and Everything Everything.
