David Longstreth’s Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices, is out April 4, 2025 on Nonesuch / New Amsterdam Records in the US and Transgressive Records internationally. A new song from the album—“Bank On,” with Portraits of Tracy—is available today, March 19; a lyric video for the song may be seen here:

Across six-and-a-half minutes, Longstreth utilizes humor in his lyrics, alongside a form that stretches the verse-chorus structure of pop while still landing just within it. “Bank On” features a vocal solo from Felicia Douglass, a Longstreth verse inspired by Songs in The Key of Life (but with harpsichord), a signature Dirty Projectors female-harmony chorus, and a thundering Mahler-esque brass fanfare. Its subject is the curdled relationship between capitalism and manufactured complacence in the face of the wholesale destruction of our planet.

“I can imagine the title of this song in the voice of Sean Penn’s Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High: ‘Bank on, bro,’” Longstreth says. “The title is short for a phrase in the lyrics, ‘bank on apocalypse:’ short selling our collective investment in a livable future in the hopes of making a buck in the meantime. It’s kind of a Shock Doctrine idea. The chorus is a reverse-reverb call to prayer from the future, invoking horror and regret over our failed custodianship of the planet. The central image of ‘Bank On’ is of one of those big granite-block, doric-columns emblems of institutional permanence built on eroding sand. Banks on banks on banks. Keep swaying the kelpbeds in Babylon. Bank on, bro.”

BANK ON

apologies, thanks and praise
phrases leash familiar griefs
to the dais

and that’s my weekend
and that’s my only regret:
interrupting webs of predictive text
from the deep end
i guess that’s just how i’m needed
keep swaying the kelpbeds in babylon,
keep slimming the margins
to not face the end
bank on, apologies, bank on
apology
my apologies
my apology is
no apology
i see your loneliness,
icy and obdurate,
betting on tulips in motion
banking to shore up the sand
banks all of salt pepper granite
banks all of concrete and gold
bank that old apocalypse
bank on
but then you say the words
and the stardust calms us all
(though the words themselves
are ornamental)
it’s hope that turns the day
least that’s how i pray
and from hope words to deeds is leaps
vines in the embers
barbs in the feathers
they are the messengers' polygons
apology
tulips in motion
my apologies
and the kelpbeds in babylon
my apology is

and vines in the embers
no apology
where the veins in the marble the color of cobalt

Performed by Longstreth with his band Dirty Projectors—Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell—and the Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e, conducted by André de Ridder, Song of the Earth also features Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, and Portraits of Tracy; it also includes words by journalist David Wallace-Wells.

Just as Dirty Projectors’ Rise Above sounds nothing like Damaged—the Black Flag album upon which it was based—Song of the Earth bears little resemblance to its namesake: Gustav Mahler’s 1908 song-poem Das Lied Von Der Erde. But Longstreth notes that “it is saturated with the Mahler work’s themes, feelings, and spirit of dissolved contradiction. It is a genre-bending song cycle,” he continues. “On the one hand modernist and minimalist but more related to The Beatles and The Beach Boys than to Mahler.” 

Longstreth wrote the first draft of Song of the Earth in six “manic” weeks for a commission arranged by s t a r g a z e, feeling disoriented, but also galvanized, by the moment he was in: the pandemic chaos, the “radical psychedelia” of new fatherhood, the novelty of writing for large ensemble. He then spent three years revising, rewriting, rearranging, and recording in studios and homes in the Netherlands, Los Angeles, and New York City. The song cycle marks Longstreth’s biggest-yet foray into the field of concert music. It received its US premiere in a March 2024 sold-out performance at Disney Hall in Los Angeles with the LA Philharmonic. Work-in-progress performances also took place between 2022 and 2024 at the Barbican in London, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, and Muziekgebouw Amsterdam.