Today, North Carolina’s acclaimed indie-Americana quartet Mipso release their fourth album, Edges Run (April 6th, 2018 | AntiFragile Music). Edges Run is available now on all digital service platforms and for physical purchase at www.mipsomusic.com. The band begins their extensive album release tour tonight, hitting 30+ markets throughout the US through mid-May, with additional summer dates to be announced. The current list of confirmed Mipso tour dates is included below.
Edges Run Now Available Worldwide for Streaming/ Download.
Edges Run is receiving early praise from critics and fans alike. The album’s first two singles - “People Change” and the title track “Edges Run” - receiving over 755K streams on Spotify in the few weeks they have been available, with Spotify Playlist listeners nearing 15 million and featured on “Relax & Unwind,” “Afternoon Acoustic,” “Fresh Folk,” “Morning Acoustic,” “Pulse of Americana,” “Roots Rising” and many others.
Edges Run was recently named “Best New Music” by American Songwriter Magazine, with PopMatters encouraging listeners to “...enjoy making multiple runs through ‘Edges Run’ to let its tried-and-true virtues — from intricate harmonies to magnetic musicianship to splendid storytelling — soak in before feeling an emotional rush that you'll want to experience again and again.” No Depression reviews, “Mipso balances heavy heartbreak and introspection with poppy, good-times acoustic pop. It's a good spectrum for the quartet, in that it allows for a wide sonic and emotional range.”
Mipso has always been a creative democracy, and on Edges Run the band takes this ideal to greater lengths than ever before. “We’d all seen a lot of change in a short period,” says Sharp of the time between the band’s recent 2016 release, Coming Down The Mountain, and Edges Run - recorded in early 2017. “Three of us moved out of the Triangle area and into other places. We had relationships end and deaths of friends and family members.”
Those events alone could account for the deeply introspective themes on Edges Run, recorded during the dead of winter in Eugene, Oregon. “We were beginning to feel, probably for the first time, that youth was more behind us than ahead, and so I think we were all feeling different pressures closing in,” says Sharp. So the band took a step back to consider their songs-in-progress — and took a leap of faith in traveling far from their North Carolina comfort zone to record in Oregon with producer (and bassist) Todd Sickafoose (Ani DiFranco, Andrew Bird, Anaïs Mitchell).
They carried with them into the sessions a desire to stretch themselves beyond previously known roads of composition and performance. For the first time, Mipso came to the studio with sketches of songs rather than fully-fleshed arrangements and decided to co-write songs together, also a first for the band. Call it a new level of confidence or a developing collective consciousness, but with five years as a band and hundreds of nights on the road together, with the release of Edges Run Mipso retains its traditional roots while becoming thoroughly modern, intuitive musicians with the ability to transcend conventions and embrace what lies ahead.
“We have a better idea of what we can do, and how we want to do it,” says Sharp.
