Mystery Jets return with roaring single ‘Black Sage’

Mystery Jets are back, having just dropped ‘Black Sage’ - a new track (out now via Fiction Records) that marks their first release in four years, and the start of the next chapter for the indie faves.

Having last released an album (‘A Billion Heartbeats’) back in 2020, the London band have looked to spirituality as the inspiration for their latest offering, which pairs reverb-drenched psych riffs with meditations on the Native American practice of saging, or ‘smudging’. 

Explaining more about the single’s concept, frontman Blaine Harrison has commented: “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? The message of the song is that healing is inseparable from suffering, but there is beauty to be found in the broken.”

In a return to their early process of writing via extended jam sessions, ‘Black Sage’ was born from what Blaine has described as “a patchwork” of recordings, wherein the band would “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”.

Watch this space for more to come from Mystery Jets soon… and in the meantime, check out the official video for ‘Black Sage’ below.