Detroit, MI-based instrumental doom folk duo Moonrisers, guitarist Libby DeCamp and drummer Adam Schreiber, announced their Dan Auerbach-produced debut album Harsh & Exciting today with the cinematic, reverberating lead single “Circle Of The Seasons." Recorded in a Nashville house that predates country music as seen in the video, the album is a new and nuanced take on old and earthy musical styles: folk, blues, jazz, gospel, even cowboy songs. "'Circle Of The Seasons' is a sparse, gritty mood piece with a circular drum groove and lilting guitar drawls that flow into one another, evoking the ebbs, flows, and cyclical natures of life," says the band.
"It’s an instrumental record, but it reads more like a landscape," says DeCamp. "There’s a lot of space in it. Nature is at the heart of what we were hearing and what we were trying to convey. And we wanted to connect with that kind of timelessness in nature through our old, rickety instruments." On Harsh & Exciting, DeCamp and Schreiber created a song cycle of sorts, representing one leg of a longer journey: a cycle of departures and arrivals with no known destination.
The couple have been playing together for 12 years, but individually they’ve been making music for much longer. Schreiber is now busy session player who has worked with Stevie Nicks, Madi Diaz, and Luke Sital-Singh, among others. DeCamp has been making a name for herself as a singer-songwriter whose 2021 debut, Westward and Faster, revealed her to be a bold guitarist and an insightful lyricist. "We’ve both had long, mixed journeys," she says. Their at-home living room jam sessions intensified during the pandemic, when touring was an impossibility, and the couple began uploading videos to their social media, which were discovered by producer Dan Auerbach. Schreiber began playing drums for Easy Eye Sound artists Hermanos Gutiérrez and Robert Finley, the duo released their debut track "Tall Shadow" on the 2022 compilation Tell Everybody!, and they played their first public show as Moonrisers at the annual Easy Eye Fish Fry.
