Anna Meredith announces ‘DARLING’, her first studio album since 2019’s Mercury-nominated ‘FIBS’, out Feb. 12 via Mercury KX. Hear ‘Dusky’
Anna Meredith has always written music that sounds like it is trying to outrun itself. Her new album promises to run even harder. On Tuesday (Oct. 6), the Scottish composer and electronic musician announced ‘DARLING‘, an 11-track record due Feb. 12, 2027 via Mercury KX, and shared its opening track and first single, ‘Dusky’. It is her first studio album since 2019’s Mercury Prize-nominated ‘FIBS’, and she frames it as music built to cope with a moment that feels overwhelming.
Meredith calls the record “a conduit for energy and joy.” In her statement, she describes it as a channeling of intensity and euphoria, music designed to summon motion, tension and release at a time when both her own life and the wider world feel like too much. That framing gives the album an unusual emotional stake for music this exuberant. She also says she wanted to lean into a more technicolor version of her sound, chasing higher highs and stranger turns with more confidence than before.
‘Dusky’ Sets the Manifesto
‘Dusky‘ makes that ambition audible immediately. Meredith presents it as a mission statement for the whole album, and it is crammed with the things she says she loves writing most: “polyrhythms, parpy brass, metric modulations, waily synths.” The result is a frantic, joyful pileup, brass and synths jostling for space as the meter keeps shifting underneath them. She built much of the track backward from a single destination, a heavy electric guitar riff for bandmate Jack Ross, then searched for the least predictable route to reach it. It is the kind of piece that rewards close listening and loud playback in equal measure.
The video, made by Ewan Jones Morris with Meredith, matches the music’s restlessness. Its surreal stop-motion world of curtains and doors grew out of a conversation about moving through portals into increasingly unexpected rooms, and Jones Morris has likened the finished piece to a theatrical game of peekaboo.
Seven Years of Side Quests
Meredith has hardly been idle since ‘FIBS’. She released ‘Bumps Per Minute: 18 Studies for Dodgems’, music made for a bumper-car sound installation, in 2021, collaborated with the Ligeti Quartet on ‘Nuc‘ and scored films including ‘The End We Start From’. Most recently, she composed the score for ‘Wicker’, a Sundance fantasy comedy starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård that reaches U.S. theaters on Oct. 23. Along the way, she was awarded an MBE for services to music.
Her pop-facing albums have always been the most direct expression of her style. Her 2016 debut ‘Varmints’ won the Scottish Album of the Year Award, and ‘FIBS’ extended that streak with a Mercury Prize nomination. Both came out on Moshi Moshi. ‘DARLING’ moves her to Mercury KX, a label home that sits naturally between the classical and electronic worlds she has spent her career connecting.
A Pink Vinyl Statement
Even the formats lean playful. Alongside digital, CD and standard vinyl releases, ‘DARLING’ will come as a limited double 12-inch pressed in ‘Flumps Pink’, with the music spread across three sides and an etching on side D. It is a fitting touch for an artist whose seriousness has always come wrapped in a sense of humor.
Few composers move between concert halls, film scores and festival stages as freely as Meredith, and fewer make that movement sound like fun. If ‘Dusky’ is any guide, ‘DARLING’ will treat maximalism not as excess but as a survival strategy, a way of answering an overwhelming world with music that refuses to sit still.
