release feature

Beck Names His New Album Ride Lonesome — And It's Not the Orchestral Record He Teased

Seven years after Hyperspace, Beck reconvenes his Sea Change and Mutations collaborators for a fifteenth album mixed by Nigel Godrich.

In April 2025, fresh off a two-night stand at London's Royal Albert Hall, Beck told anyone listening that he was working on an orchestral album. Sixteen months later, what actually arrives is Ride Lonesome — his fifteenth studio record, and not an orchestra in sight. Instead, he called back the players who built some of his most quietly devastating work: Smokey Hormel, Joey Waronker, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., and Jason Falkner, the same names scattered across the credits of Mutations, Sea Change, and Morning Phase. Whatever the orchestral idea turns into, it isn't this. This is a reunion record, cut at Room B in United Studios, Hollywood, and it's Beck's first collection of new material since 2019's Hyperspace — a seven-year gap that's long even by his own unhurried standards.

That gap is worth sitting with. Beck has never been an artist who disappears out of writer's block; he's released a covers-and-rarities set, chased genre left turns, and toured steadily in the interim, including that Royal Albert Hall residency and, just this January, the compilation Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime. But a proper studio album carrying his own new songs hadn't landed since Hyperspace. Ride Lonesome isn't a comeback so much as a return to a specific room with a specific band — which is really the story here.

## The Sea Change Band, Reassembled

Pulling Hormel, Waronker, Meldal-Johnsen, Manning, and Falkner back into one session isn't a nostalgia move so much as a bet on chemistry that's had two decades to age. These are the musicians who helped Beck sound heartbroken and elegant on Sea Change in 2002, sparse and strange on Mutations in 1998, and warm and windswept on Morning Phase in 2014. Beck himself described the sessions as playing and chemistry that had evolved and deepened into something built over decades of working together, while also turning up new sounds and emotional textures along the way — which is a fairly precise way of saying the band knows each other well enough now to find things they couldn't have found the first time around.

Nigel Godrich mixed the record, his third go-round with Beck after Mutations and Sea Change, and that pairing carries its own weight. Godrich's fingerprints on those two albums are part of why they sound the way they do — spacious, a little haunted, never overcrowded. Having him back in the chain for Ride Lonesome, rather than someone new, reads like Beck wanted the sonic lineage to actually connect, not just the personnel.

## A Rollout Built on Singles, Not Silence

The album's rollout has been unusually generous with advance material. The title track and lead single "Ride Lonesome" arrived April 20, 2026, with a music video, and then got a second life on June 26 with a version featuring Sierra Ferrell — an unusual move that suggests the label sees the song as flexible enough to support two distinct releases rather than a one-and-done promotional single. "In The Night" followed as the second single on July 15, backed by a video directed by Mikai Karl and starring French actor Denis Lavant, whose casting alone signals this campaign isn't playing it safe visually.

The full tracklist runs twelve songs: "Ride Lonesome," "Run Away," "In The Night," "Failed Words," "Bleed," "Disappearing Act," "For Your Love," "Slow Canyon," "It Ends Right Here," "Falling Through My Hands," "If You Don't Know What Love Is," and "Beyond The Light." Titles like "Bleed," "Disappearing Act," and "It Ends Right Here" sit in the same emotional neighborhood as the Sea Change-era band that's playing on them, though what that actually sounds like across twelve tracks is still an open question until the record is out.

Beck is backing the release with a U.S. and Canada tour running through September and October 2026, which means the album isn't arriving to sit quietly — it's arriving with a road map already attached. For a artist who's spent the last few years bouncing between compilations, residencies, and teased side projects, committing to a proper tour behind a proper album is its own kind of statement.

What's still unresolved is where that orchestral album fits into this timeline. Beck mentioned it as a work in progress well before Ride Lonesome had a name, which means either it's still coming as a genuinely separate project, or the two ideas quietly merged and this is as orchestral as it gets. Either way, the band on this record has earned the right to be heard on its own terms first.

Releases on the radar

Artists in this guide

Explore related genre guides

Continue with related release guides

Original reporting