English songwriter Patrick Wolf has announced his comeback EP The Night Safari with lead single, “Enter the Day,” his first new release in over a decade.
We last heard from Wolf with 2012’s Sundark and Riverlight, a double-album acoustic reimagining of his catalog. “Enter the Day” arrives exactly 20 years after his debut, The Patrick Wolf EP. The song opens with searching pianos and the words, “There is no easy way to begin/ Telling the story of the year of your drowning.”
In a statement, Wolf said that when he wrote the song he’d been thinking about his mother, who died of cancer in 2018. “A charcoal drawing of a sparrow hawk was the last work my mother was making before she died and when I took my first walk to explore the land around my new home back when I moved to live by the sea, a sparrow hawk was soaring over me in silence at the mouth of the bay,” he wrote. “That afternoon I went home to my upright piano and began writing this song, which ended up becoming an epilogue to the narrative of The Night Safari EP. As producer I crafted this song as a bridge out of the plaintive production of Sundark and Riverlight to where the new EP will safari the listener to.”
Check out “Enter the Day” below. The Night Safari is expected in 2023.