First Listen: Sarah Blasko‘I Awake’

“At times I thought this record would kill me. Honestly, it was a behemoth! There were moments I felt I would sink beneath it.” Sarah Blasko clearly struggled with her fourth album but the follow-up to 2009’s As Day Follows Night is finally set for release on October 26.

With a rumble of drums the lead single and title track ‘I Awake’ released earlier today makes good on Blasko’s description of the album as “An avalanche of sound, soaring and shrieking, simple and striking, to send you tumbling.” The track also features the sound of your favourite Eastern European strings section with the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra supplying the stirring finale.

Blasko spent the first half of last year in Brighton, England “alone with [her] thoughts and memories. Haunted and unsettled” before heading to Stockholm, Sweden with As Day Follows Night engineer and mixer, Lasse Mårtén to begin recording the album.

I Awake track list:

I Awake
An Arrow
Bury This
God-Fearing
All Of Me
New Country
Here
Illusory Light
Fool
Cast The Net
An Oyster, A Pearl
Not Yet