Slow Burn Drifters –upcoming debut album, out March 7, 2025.
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Singer-guitarist Ray Vale of Slow Burn Drifters selected their tantalizing band name “for what someone’s about to hear,” exemplifying his dark, dreamy, elegiacally timeless vocals and guitars. He’s joined by the resplendent piano playing of Violet Booth on their album Golden, out March 7th, 2025. Vale’s dramatic and passionate wide-screen vocals and songs and playing will please devoted fans of artists like Nick Drake and Scott Walker, and of the kind of music that haunts the frames of David Lynch films.
Vale grew up in Northern NJ looking at the Manhattan skyline, and now he’s living in Austria looking at a very different boundary between earth and sky. Vale has written all the songs for Golden, the debut full-length for Slow Burn Drifters, but this is Vale’s 12th album. “In comparison to the other records I’ve put out, this one is more personal; it’s also more melodic,” Vale reveals. “Additionally, Violet’s piano plays a key role in most songs, whereas it was more textural and decorative in the past.”
As for what the ten-song cycle Golden is about, Vale explains “I heard an interview once where someone was asked about eternity,” Vale says. “I think it might've been Joseph Campbell, and he said something like, ‘Eternity isn't a long time; it's what stands outside of time.’ That always stuck with me—the album title refers to that state of being, or a part of us that remains unchanged by time and moves past the appearance of separateness, like sunrise and sunset, it's a song about pain and loss, hope, or anything in between, that's the golden prism through which the album's songs are being viewed.”