New Iron & Wine

NPR Music streams the forthcoming Iron & Wine album, "Ghost on Ghost."

For all its rich, Technicolor brightness, Iron and Wine's new Ghost on Ghost retains the capacity to burrow knowingly into bleak Wisconsin winters ("Winter Prayers") with an acute understanding of loneliness and alienation. Even amid cheery oohs and ahhs, "The Desert Babbler" finds Beam warning wearily, "California's gonna kill you soon."


Still, Ghost on Ghost isn't all wry fatalism coated in studio gloss, as Beam also finds space for bits of warmly dreamy vulnerability. In the appropriately titled "Joy," for example, he opens with an openhearted confession — "Deep inside the heart of this troubled man / there's an itty-bitty boy tugging hard at your hand" — before giving thanks to a devoted lover who keeps him grounded.