White Lung. Photo by Lindsey Byrnes
White Lung‘s last album, Paradise, came out in 2016, and the radio silence from the Canadian post-hardcore group in the following years suggested that their string of acclaimed albums and EPs had come to an end. But in September, the group announced their final album, Premonition, due out December 2 on their longtime label Domino. Today, joining the two songs that were released with the album’s announcement, is another new track called “If You’re Gone.”
Bleak, greyscale, and beautiful as a vast expanse of tundra seen from the sky, “If You’re Gone” courses with urgency as well as the love of a good, heavy guitar lick. In a press statement, frontperson Mish Way described the (potentially triggering) subject matter of the song: “Suicide was in the zeitgeist in many ways when I wrote this song. At the time, a few prominent public figures had killed themselves and they all had children. I was thinking about postpartum depression and how real it can hit. The song is about the emotions of children when their parent is now gone and how they deal with that loss. It also looks at the struggle parents face when life gets so bad one doesn’t see another way but to end it.”
