Manchester Orchestra

Following their acclaimed 2021 album The Million Masks of God, Manchester Orchestra is back with The Valley of Vision, a brand new project that takes on the weighty themes of adulthood, faith and redemption through a wealth of fresh new sounds and textures. But if The Million Masks of God served as a cry for help – exploring a man’s encounter with the angel of death, inspired by frontman and songwriter Andy Hull’s reflections on grief as well as the battle with cancer faced by guitarist Robert McDowell’s father – The Valley of Vision offers a collective, cathartic expression of gratitude. Throughout the 27-minute album, you can almost feel the band take a giant exhale and then put its arms around you.

Continuing to push themselves into fascinating and immersive creative realms with each release has always been the mantra for Manchester Orchestra, and The Valley of Vision finds the band reinvigorated once again. Across the six-song salvo and VR film out March 10th, the band conjures a story that is further illuminated through a cinematic experience by writer-director Isaac Deitz, created with 3D-computed radiography technology. 

Hull started writing and recording The Valley of Vision in the summer of 2021, sparking a spontaneous and new approach to releasing his band’s music. “Making this was an exciting idea of what the future could be for us in terms of how we create.”

Hull was inspired to begin writing the record while rummaging around in his suitcase looking for his lyric notebook and instead found The Valley of Vision, a 1975 book of old Puritan prayers his mom had given to him the previous Christmas. “I realized it should be our title too, because to me, it meant you can’t see the forest for the trees, but you’re recognizing you’re in the valley, and you can eventually get out,” he says.

The Get Up Kids’ hyper melodies, heartfelt lyrics, and punk-driven, high-energy sound helped them become one of the most popular and influential of the second wave of emo bands that crested in the late ’90s. After a series of singles and a scrappy debut album, 1997’s Four Minute Mile, they released the critically acclaimed Something to Write Home About album in 1999. Over the next few years, their sound shifted to a more mature and measured approach. Though the band split in 2005, they were playing live shows together again by the late 2000s and returned to the studio sporadically to record new music, including 2011’s self-released full-length There Are Rules and 2019s Problems, which harked back to the energetic emo-pop sound of their early days while adding lyrical perspective brought on by the passage of time.