Mystery Jets end six-year silence with ‘Black Sage’ and a return to their earliest instincts

Mystery Jets have ended a six-year break with ‘Black Sage’, a rattling new single that suggests the Twickenham band are stepping into another phase rather than simply circling back to familiar ground. Released now via Fiction Records, the track arrives with producer Leo Abrahams, whose credits include Brian Eno and Frightened Rabbit, and it leans hard into feedback, momentum and a kind of unraveling psych-rock tension that feels more live wire than polish.

The song is the band’s first new material since A Billion Heartbeats, their seventh studio album, which came out in 2020. That record marked a later-career stretch in which Mystery Jets were already thinking in bigger, more public terms, with protest songs and NHS tributes threaded into the band’s identity. Black Sage feels different in method if not in ambition. Blaine Harrison’s vocal folds around the line:

“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”

and the lyric gives the track its central idea without sanding down its edge.

Harrison has said the title carries its own symbolism. “For centuries, black sage has been used by indigenous communities in smudging ceremonies, where the smoke is believed to clear away negative energies or unwanted spirits. But what if we are vessels for those energies, and the ghosts from our pasts have been living inside us all along?” he explained. It is a loaded frame for a song that, by the band’s own account, came together not in a neat burst but through a messier process of extended jams, loops and improvisation.

“The message of the song is that healing is inseparable from suffering, but there is beauty to be found in the broken,” Harrison said. “Some songs arrive all at once, but ‘Black Sage’ came to life by stitching together a patchwork of extended jam sessions, where we’d loop ideas around and improvise until we reached a kind of hypnotic flow state, allowing the song to reveal to us what it wanted to become. We’ve not written that way since the very earliest days of the band, so we knew it had to be the first track to share from this new chapter”.

The release also lands against a slightly altered band landscape. In 2022, bassist Jack Flanagan launched his solo career with Rides The Sky, which included the psychedelic single Skyhorse X Skyhorse. Mystery Jets themselves were last heard on Home Protests, the lockdown covers album they issued in 2020 after recording lo-fi versions of nine songs spanning the last half-century, from discrimination and homelessness to war, consumer capitalism and environmental destruction.

The band’s next live date is already set. They are due to play The Maccabees’ show at Leeds’ Kirkstall Abbey on July 31, alongside Maximo Park and Everything Everything. For a group that has spent years shifting between indie-folk reflexes, broad political commentary and more elastic psychedelic instincts, Black Sage sounds less like a comeback single than a reminder of how much ground they still have left to cover.