A Black Mile to the Surface

In 2014, American indie rock band Manchester Orchestra released two companion albums, Cope and Hope.[2] Following the release of the two albums, keyboard player Chris Freeman departed the band, leaving vocalist Andy Hull and guitarist Robert McDowell the only original members.[3] In 2016, Hull and McDowell collaborated on the soundtrack for the film Swiss Army Man.[4] The experience of crafting an a cappella soundtrack inspired Manchester Orchestra's approach to their next album, with McDowell saying that it "flipped the reset switch" and inspired Manchester Orchestra to "make every little second interesting".[3]

The first three songs to be written for the album were "The Alien", "The Sunshine", and "The Grocery". Hull says, "[o]nce those were written and connected like that, we started to be like, 'Oh you know it'd be cool to do that for the whole thing and actually commit to it'".[5] Many of the songs were reworked over periods of several months, with Hull estimating that "The Moth" took about four and a half months to reach its final form.[6] Hull said that "The Maze" and "The Mistake" both took the longest to perfect, and that producer John Congleton came up with "one more push" that perfected those two tracks.[7]

Manchester Orchestra recorded A Black Mile to the Surface with "a small battery of well-known indie rock producers", among them Catherine Marks, John Congleton, and Jonathan Wilson, as well as longtime collaborator Dan Hannon.[8] The recording process began at Echo Mountain Recording in Asheville, North Carolina in the summer of 2016.[8][9] Marks and Manchester Orchestra had begun collaborating over the phone several months prior, and after a week of pre-production, Marks described the two-week studio recording process as a "sonic discovery", during which she and the band experimented with ideas for how each song should sound.[10] Manchester Orchestra traveled to London with Marks for mixing, and Los Angeles for additional production with Congleton, before finishing production at their headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.[8][11]

A Black Mile to the Surface has been classified as indie rock, alternative rock,[12] and Americana, with comparisons to Fleet Foxes,[13] Band of Horses,[14][15] and Mumford & Sons.[15][16] It began life as a concept album set in the mining town of Lead, South Dakota, the home of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF).[17] As the album developed, the South Dakota narrative began to interweave with Hull's complicated emotions about the birth of his daughter, and his associated feelings of life and death.[18] The opening track, "The Maze", was written a month after the birth of Hull's daughter.[19] While the first four tracks set "a light and dark theme", the narrative part of the record begins on "The Alien", which follows a boy from his childhood abuse into his adult life.[6]

Sonically, Hull and the rest of the band sought to divert from the "heavy, crunchy guitars" that marked other Manchester Orchestra releases.[20] Hull was influenced by the "minimalist aspect" of Alabama Shakes' 2015 record Sound & Color, as well as the bands Wilco and Radiohead. He challenged his bandmates to "[t]ry and do the opposite" of "whatever you're instinctively going to want to play".[8] Marks' vision for the album involved wanting every song to sound like a different room, "Like you could understand where you were in the room and identify where each particular sound was coming from."[21] This process involved physically recording in different rooms of the studios to utilize their different reverberations.[21] The penultimate track, "The Parts", for instance, was recorded in a studio's bathtub, due in part to a hangover from which Hull was suffering.[3]

Hull has said that the central theme of A Black Mile to the Surface is "family, and the circle of life, the significance and insignificance of yourself". The repeated motif of There's nothing I've got when I die that I keep, Hull explained, means: "When this life ends, all you can do is hopefully affect and influence what happens after you."[3] The title of the album derives from a line in "The Gold", selected by a friend of the band as he read through the lyrics.[7]

Manchester Orchestra performing in support of A Black Mile to the Surface in 2017.

Manchester Orchestra announced the name, track list, and cover art for A Black Mile to the Surface on June 9, 2017. The announcement was accompanied by the album's lead single, "The Gold", and a music video for the song, directed by Mike Dempsey and Johnny Chew.[22] The second single, "The Alien", was released 13 days later on NPR, with a video directed by Dempsey and the Daniels.[23] The final pre-album single, "The Moth", was released on July 10, 2017.[24] A Black Mile to the Surface was released on July 21, 2017, through Loma Vista Recordings and the band's own independent label Favorite Gentlemen.[12]

On June 12, 2017, only a few days after the album's announcement, Manchester Orchestra announced a fall 2017 headlining tour.[25] In July, they added support from Tigers Jaw and Foxing to the bill.[26] This was followed by a coheadlining tour with the Front Bottoms in November and December 2018,[27] and a winter 2019 tour with Oso Oso and Foxing to celebrate Manchester Orchestra's 10th anniversary of Mean Everything to Nothing.[28] On February 12, 2021, the band performed A Black Mile To The Surface: The Global Concert Film, a YouTube livestream of the album in its entirety recorded from Echo Mountain Recording studios. Hull described the concert film as "the perfect way to close the Black Mile chapter".[29]

Credits taken from A Black Mile to the Surface liner notes.[1]