Stranded Details New Album ‘Velvet Trace’, Shares “Aftermath”

Stranded Details New Album 'Velvet Trace', Shares "Aftermath"

Atlanta-based post punk/dance/psych/new wave artist Stranded (aka David Mansfield) has revealed full details of his upcoming album ‘Velvet Trace’.

Produced and mixed by Vacant Lots’ Jared Artaud, the 10-track record will be out on September 27 via Grey Market Records. Pre-order it here.

The collaboration between Mansfield and Artaud led to Velvet Trace’s songs being mutated, blown apart, put back together. “I told him to do whatever he wanted,” Mansfield recalls. “He made things meaner and nastier.”

Mansfield gave Artaud reference points like Clinic and nods to the Walkmen’s penchant for spinning a story, but what still comes through is Manfield’s core DNA — the autumnal drama of the Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen, here more romantic, haunting, and grandiose than on any preceding Stranded release.

Within Stranded’s newly dense array of sounds, Mansfield is chasing fragments of memories, the immediacy of the music keeping things just grounded enough so he can run off into the ether. “I might take a moment, a slight memory, an image from that, and then build from it,” he says of his writing process.

That’s how he defines the title Velvet Trace: “something softly holding in place, a memory, a fleeting emotion.” Between the swirling atmospherics of the music and Mansfield’s allusive words, he’s given us a space to get lost in, to find our own other worlds in. 

Check out the album’s tracklist and listen to new single “Aftermath” below.

Stranded ‘Velvet Trace’ Tracklist:

  1. Aftermath
  2. Burnt Offerings
  3. Vacant Spirits
  4. Channels
  5. Broken Circles
  6. Awake
  7. Static Lights
  8. Hollow Morning
  9. Leave No Trace
  10. Hanging Pastures