CLARA MANN announces new album 'Wishbone' out 23rd October via state51 & shares first single "News From Home".

CLARA MANN - Announces new album Wishbone out Oct 23rd via state51 - Shares new single "News From Home" - Tour dates announced

Photo credit: Ella Margolin Today South London-based multidisciplinary artist Clara Mann announces new album Wishbone, set for release Oct 23rd via state51 and shares the lead single "News From Home". On the track Clara said ""This song is a thread between a once-home landscape and my real, adult life. It’s about visiting and looking at my hometown, knowing that, whilst this used to be everything, my whole life, now I have a big wide life of my own, and things to get back to - and holding both of those next to each other, and seeing how they make each other more beautiful, and also more strange. The instrumentation is supposed to have a feeling of an old country song, slightly haunting percussion and the shimmery synth…. I thought about big wide open skies and walking over the hills at golden hour.” "News From Home" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw0CKxWT7hc "News From Home" on other streaming services: https://clara-mann.lnk.to/news-from-home Towards the end of Leos Carax's 1991 film ‘Les Amants du Pont-Neuf’ (‘The Lovers on the Bridge’), its drifting protagonists, a struggling artist and a half-blind painter, careen down the Seine as the city explodes with fireworks, the destitute lovers briefly possessing all of Paris. “It got to me more than anything I’ve watched in years,” says Clara Mann, who watched it on a small laptop screen in the middle of making her second album, Wishbone. Carax’s vision of love was a construction where worlds could be rebuilt and seen from the position of two – physical exaltations pitched against despair, light against dark, beauty and ruin struck from the same flint – a vision the South London songwriter couldn’t shake. Where Mann’s 2025 debut album Rift sat in a single strange, isolated shade of blue, Wishbone is built instead on contrast: a record with a kind of luminosity running through it, the brightest passages made legible by shadow. From the very beginning of Wishbone, Mann found herself attempting something that had never come naturally to her. After the nostalgic introspection of Rift, she was determined to imagine good things for herself, and believe they might actually be within reach. It was, she says, a frightening decision – to picture a life that’s beautiful and allow herself to want it. Mann likens the wishbone image that gives the record its name to Marina Abramović's ‘Rest Energy’, the performance in which artist and partner hold a drawn bow and arrow between their bodies – a single gesture living in total trust and the possibility of ruin. It’s an emblem of love, but also of the larger wager the album keeps making; wanting good things, and letting other people want them for you, is worth the risk of the break. It’s a concept that’s never only romantic in Mann’s world – it stands for the whole precarious business of being held by anyone at all. Perhaps as a result of this intention, Mann’s voice has never sounded more assured than on these songs: a clear and distinct instrument that’s both guiding and guided, raw and guttural when needed, the pied piper to her own balladic intonations when not. "Fortuna" was the first song written for the new album – a bridge between here and Rift – with its devastating opening couplet coming to terms with the distance to her old life: “Now that I only see colours, / I’ll forget your shape, / Blue is all I can remember, / Washed across your face.” And yet it’s shot through with joy, its loose, distant percussion drifting like a heartbeat heard through skin. Written after missing the last train home, riding two night buses through London in the early-December Christmas lights, it’s a lonely song but locked into the most vivid, magical moments of solitude. There’s a deliberate off-centredness to it that ends up feeling perfectly centred, recalling the meandering cadence of Jolie Holland. “I felt very bare writing a lot of this album,” admits Mann. “I wasn’t interested in hiding behind the songs anymore, or being elusive or oblique. Throughout the record, there’s this sense of wanting to be witnessed, and recognised - and in order for those things to happen, you yourself have to be fully present, and willing to be seen. I wanted to live, and to write, from that feeling. Ultimately, that sense of presence is also what most clearly separates this record from the last. In Rift, we heard Mann still full of open questions; Wishbonehas little of that backward pull. Now in her mid-20s, she writes from conviction more than question, feeling more than place. She leans deliberately into the songwriting tradition, reaching for the rough-edged, performance-driven spirit of artists like Fiona Apple and Tom Waits while keeping faith with an older lineage of plainspoken English balladry. She has the folk singer's instinct for letting air move through a song, for trusting a melody to carry meaning without ornament, but the songs across Wishbone resist the costume-drama pieties of revivalism. The ballad here is a living form; a way of telling the truth at a slight angle.   Produced by 4AD resident Fabian Prynn, the two of them built the album’s world together from Mann’s demos and voice notes across a handful of intense, sometimes 14-hour long days at Norfolk’s Bam Bam Studios. “I was so not used to hearing my music expanded like this,” laughs Mann, recalling the first time she heard Prynn’s drums across the tracks. “The purest expression of a lot of this music, as I had experienced it, had always been me alone in a big hall.” But allowing in players she barely knew for the first time – Prynn joined by guitarist Kit Mosely, double bass player Marianne Schofield, alongside trusted friends Owen Spafford on viola, Martin Egidi on cello and Tennessee Woodiel on banjo – the songs became even more recognisable and alive to her. The abstract she was chasing was to make the album shimmer without dilution; to make it beautiful and bright but with a grounding intention, achieved best, it transpired, when she didn’t have to carry the weight of the songs alone.  Innumerable moments across Wishbone fall serendipitously like jigsaw pieces into place. "Go Getter" and "Song for Joy" draw the most striking parallels, both arriving when Mann couldn’t see her own strength. ‘Go Getter’ was written after cancelling a major show for reasons out of her control, where she called her friend to let them down, who simply replied that it was alright: he had dreamt of her last night, well and laughing, in a room full of light somewhere in Europe. The song has a galloping chorus, in audible recovery, pushing towards brightness (“I remember you saying / I’m a real go getter / And everything that I lose comes back around”). “I really felt in that moment that I was not without hope,” she explains, “I wasn’t ok, I couldn’t see my way out of this, but someone else could.” In "Song For Joy", however, she relies on herself, writing down reminders of joy. “There’s a stillness in that song,” she says, “I could remember the parts of me that wanted to be strong and were fighting but I couldn’t access them.” Her vocal steadies, almost to a whisper: “Sure as the water flows over the dam / Good things will find me wherever I am.”  "I'm Everyone Who's Ever Said I Love You" supplies the album's one genuinely sarcastic note, an almost country-adjacent English love song with a wry heart (“every time you tell me that you love me, I lose”). "Connie's Song" turns toward Connie Converse and the pull of disappearance, of wanting to go unknown – a finger-picked elegy for a songwriter who walked out of her own life. Presence returns as a motif in "The Izaac Walton Hotel", a slow piano ballad written about the end of a dissociative spell: the gauze pulled away, the world easing back into focus, the strange relief of being a fully dimensional person in one's own body again (following a haunting, no less). "Video Games", the last song Mann wrote, and one of her favourites, distills the entire project into the beauty of something unbearably plain: the experience of watching someone in a moment of inattention, with all the ugly and good parts of both people somehow present in the room. Around them, "All My Devotion" states its needs with disarming directness, while the waltzing "News From Home" plays like distant conversation, the talk of people back home insisting, as the lyric has it, that “I'll know a good thing when it comes.” Perhaps the most striking moment on Wishbone is "Oblivion", scored for guitar and viola; it’s the rawest record across Mann’s discography, in the lineage of Leonard Cohen's "Dress Rehearsal Rag", the kind of song you’re warned not to look directly in the eye. It began with a remark her partner made early into their relationship, that falling in love felt frighteningly like oblivion; it carries the weight of a love that burns very brightly, knowing that the flip side of such brightness runs heavy: “Nothing that I used to want will ever come to pass, / Oblivion’s in bed with me, tonight will be our last.” The title track was one of the last songs written, but finds the album’s through line. “It’s the song that defines the character of the record for me,” says Mann. “ It is about falling in love, but it’s about that feeling of conviction, and faith.” With ‘Wishbone’, I felt a confidence in myself that I wanted to express.” The version of the song on the album lingers in the close, heard-sound manner of Josephine Foster's Domestic Space – piano-led and wrapped up in total devotion (“I wanna put on your clothes,/ Wanna wear you to work every morning, / Baby I’m on your side.”) It typifies the love that runs deeply through Wishbone, and Mann is unguarded about that note. But careful to stress: it’s an album about falling in love – the vertiginous state of surrender that colours everything around it, and briefly makes the whole world beautiful. It’s not an album about being in love.  “I want to be less precious with this,” she says. But she doesn’t need to worry – Wishbone is a remarkable collection, fuelled by the totality of a hope rather than a catalogue of experience. The last couple of years have put Mann on bigger and bigger stages, opening for Ben Howard,  sharing rooms with the cathedral-sized melancholy of Youth Lagoon, and the shoe fits. Wishbone is the sound of an artist who has decided to want a good life out loud, and to keep deciding it, as she puts it, all the time. The Carax lovers get their fireworks over the Seine and then the morning after; Mann wants both, the exaltation and the cost, the bow drawn and the bone held.  Pre-order Wishbone: https://clara-mann.lnk.to/wishbone Pre-order Wishbone Dinked edition: https://ffm.bio/claramann Tour dates: 15 Sept - Hamburg, Germany, Reeperbahn Festival 16 Sept - Hamburg, Germany, Reeperbahn Festival 18 Sept - Vic, Spain, MMVV 26 Sept - Montpellier, France, International Guitar Festival 30 Oct - Lucerne, Switzerland, Echolot  15 Nov - Dublin, Sugar Club  24 Nov - Edinburgh, Pianodrome  25 Nov - Manchester, Halle St Michaels 28 Nov - Bantham, Outside  29 Nov - Bristol, Lantern Theatre at Bristol Beacon 04 Dec - London, St Matthias Church Headline tour tickets on general sale Friday at 10am. For artist pre-sale sign up to Clara’s mailing list here: https://linktr.ee/claramann