It’s been said that we know more about the surfaces of other planets in our Solar System than we do about what lies beneath the ice sheets that cover Antarctica. But that – like a lot to do with the world around us – is changing. In recent months, scientists have mapped the topography of Antarctica in hitherto unprecedented detail, revealing a hidden landscape of mountains, ridges, canyons and underground lakes. This scenery isn’t being mapped just to sate a spirit of curiosity. This data will run computer models that will tell us how quickly ice will retreat as global temperatures continue to warm, which in turn defines how quickly sea levels will rise. The contours of this ancient, hidden world will define the shape of the new.
In December 2025, Expedition PS152 set sail from Walvis Bay, Namibia, bound for the oceans of Antarctica. Co-ordinated by the Alfred Wegener Institute, the vessel carried dozens of scientists, on board to collect data on the flora and fauna of the Southern Ocean. Peruse the ship’s records, and you might have spotted a familiar name: Jonathan Meiburg. As well as being the frontman and creative force behind Shearwater, Meiburg is a qualified biologist and author, and at the time of the voyage was several years deep into the writing of a book, The Secret Land: The Once And Future Life Of Antarctica, that aimed to shed light on this most unfamiliar of landscapes.
Meiburg does not, however, draw a hard line between his scientific and musical pursuits, and time has shown that one informs the other. Sit with him on the deck of the PS152, and you might have caught him training a camera on the ocean, collecting footage he would later edit together into the video for The New World’s striking lead-off single “Daydream Unbeliever”. Its slow pan across broiling surf and cracked ice sheets is the perfect accompaniment to the song’s turbulent, rocky drama. A meditation on truth and reality set to lashes of violent percussion and ascending strings courtesy of London classical ensemble Orchestrate, it surges forth as if pulled by powerful currents.
Meiburg’s interest in the natural world has often seen Shearwater bracketed with a generation of indie-folk musicians drawing on nature and tradition to invest their music with a sort of hand-me-down authenticity. But Shearwater’s music is frequently both smarter and deeper than that of his peers. There is arguably no modern musician working today who has better assimilated the approach Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis took on his masterworks, Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock: a richly orchestrated art music assembled in a way that feels simultaneously intimate in sentiment and gigantic in scope.
The songs of The New World throng with nature imagery: elephants and coyotes, rabbits in rainstorms and slugs in the marigolds. But Meiburg’s hands-on experience of nature works in the service of his songs. A songwriter more divorced from the reality of his subject matter might unwittingly romanticise it, and thereby make something untrue. But when he turns his remarkable voice – a high, strained soul cry cut from the same cloth as Anohni or Thom Yorke – to sing of the rain lifting off the Cascades on “More And More”, or stickleback jumping in the pond on “A Mink In The Dust”, you somehow trust he’s been there, seen that.
What is real and what is unreal is a central concern of The New World. We live in a world of bad actors, deepfakes, misinformation and disinformation. The stories that we tell ourselves sometimes feel more real than the world outside. Meiburg’s antidote is direct engagement with the world. This can literally be heard in the form of field recordings, fragments of sound that Meiburg captured on his travels: “The Only Sound I’m Afraid Of” fades in over the caw of Tasmanian ravens, while the minor-key “Anamnesia” is laced with the dull drone of a baggage conveyor belt in Melbourne Airport. But more broadly, it manifests in a creative process rooted in discovery, happenstance and the messy stuff of human collaboration.
The New World, says Meiburg, was made by “the wildest ensemble we’ve ever assembled”. It was recorded over four years in locations including London, Berlin and Texas, with the core trio of Shearwater – Meiburg, keyboardist Emily Lee and drummer and engineer Dan Duszynski – a constant. But particularly vital work was done at Shahzad Ismaily’s Figure 8 studio in Brooklyn, a creative hub where a musician of any background or discipline might turn up and be cajoled into action. Members of the Malian group Ngoni Ba add ngoni and rippling rhythms played on tamma, yabara and calabash. Palestine-born Firas Zreik adds ringing qanun to “More And More”. The New York woodwindist Doug Wieselman contributes clarinet and saxophone, while returning is an old friend, the veteran percussionist Thor Harris, who last played with Shearwater circa 2013’s Fellow Travellers. On paper this cast list probably looks like a recipe for bedlam, but it’s a mark of Meiburg’s vision – not to mention mix engineer Danny Reisch’s post-production skills – that all these diverse parts can be smoothed into a record that sounds like a single, flowing whole.
This state of flow is a defining characteristic of The New World. “Even Song” opens the album in media res. “Racing through the path ahead/Even though it makes no sense,” sings Meiburg, a one-two strum on his guitar merging with the hiss of hi-hats to create a feeling of whooshing forward motion. Elsewhere, organic rhythms imply propulsion, but also friction. See the seasick 5/4 lurch of “Daydream Unbeliever”; or “A Mink In The Dust”, which lopes along like an elephant through thick scrub. We are headed somewhere – but the route is not always clear and the passage is far from easy.
Here we also find some of Shearwater’s finest songs to date. “More And More” is a slinky blues that imagines a chance meeting of Talk Talk and Nina Simone, with soft infusions of clarinet that drift through its moody passages like plumes of smoke. “The Only Sound I’m Afraid Of” is a sleek Big Music that harks back to the epic rock moves of 2016’s Jet Plane And Oxbow. “Slugs In The Marigolds” takes a playful turn, its lachrymose cast of characters considering the virtues of inebriation as an antidote against the ills of the world.
But one of the best is left ’til last. So used are we to Meiburg’s voice that the appearance of another voice – particularly one as immediately distinctive as that of Laurie Anderson, speaking as if addressing the listener directly – is quite the jolt. If The New World often feels like being carried, sometimes rockily, downstream, “You And Your Dog” is the moment where we gently flow out into a delta under a sky of glittering stars. Anderson handles the words that Meiburg wrote with care, narrating a dream-like tale of two friends who go on a beach walk, get separated, and can never quite find one other again. The combination of her soft, reassuring tone and his magic realist words meld together to make something beautiful that slides through your fingers like grains of sand. Its message perhaps – and the message of The New World more broadly – is that life is ephemeral. But the fact that we exist here, together, on this planet at the same time is both extraordinary and wonderful.
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