Birthmark, the project of Nate Kinsella shares the new single and music video “Red Meadow.” The track is off his forthcoming album Birth of Omni, available January 19th, 2024 via Polyvinyl Record Co. “Red Meadow” follows lead single “Rodney”. As with “Rodney”, “Red Meadow” discerningly navigates the transitional nature of midlife, parenthood, and how those intersecting experiences can compete with and alter the relationships we have with others, as well as what we think to be true of ourselves. The video for “Red Meadow”, directed by Nate Kinsella (and with Chris Strong as director of photography), beautifully conveys the sentiments of the song through the use of light, darkness and dance, as Kinsella and dancer Robin Mineko-Williams move together in parallel as two beings intertwined but separate.

“When my wife and I were overwhelmed with tending to our new child our romantic relationship dwindled to the point where it felt like the pilot light had gone out,” shares Kinsella of the deeply personal song. “This wasn’t a huge surprise given the circumstances, but the gap between us began to manifest in ways I hadn’t foreseen. This song is about lamenting that loss and feeling conflicted by what our new lives as parents had brought us and the need to rebalance the emotional ecosystem of our lives.”

Birthmark is the ongoing creative endeavor of Nate Kinsella, the accomplished multi-instrumentalist who over the years has also leant his considerable talent to a constellation of beloved indie groups (Joan of Arc, American Football, LIES, and Make Believe). But you’ve never heard Kinsella quite like this—totally open to every idea and emotion, unrestrained as he tries to frame the future in whatever light he can find.

Birth of Omni began in the dark. Five years ago, when Nate Kinsella began writing his fifth album under the name Birthmark, his world, like that of so many others, felt upside down. This was early 2018, a year into the Trump presidency and amid the ubiquitous American fever of mass shootings and racist violence. Just months earlier, the dawning revelations of the MeToo movement had jolted him, ending his naivete and giving him insight into how the women in his life often saw the men in theirs. Nearing 40, he was finally a father, too, with a newborn daughter and another on the way. Into what kind of world, he sensibly wondered, was he bringing these kids? Early songs wallowed in this anxious question, the dim start of what he thought might be a not-especially-uplifting EP.

But five years later, Birth of Omni is a kaleidoscopic wonder of sound and sentiment, asking the same question Kinsella first posed for himself but arriving at a surprising answer—maybe a better world, in fact, if only we can all be a little more open. Opportunities to grieve and fret overflowed, he reckoned, but he also wanted to celebrate the possibility of change, the joy of wonder, the essence of being. The result is the most dazzling and dynamic album of his storied career, with heavy beats and heavenly harps, cascading harmonies and quiet hymns, brutal noise and blissful arpeggios woven into 10 songs that capture the highs and lows, the vexations and victories of marriage, parenthood, and life itself.

The sequence of upending events that yielded those first sketches didn’t end, of course. But when the pandemic began two years into work on Birth of Omni, Kinsella took its suspension of reality as an invitation to forget his own rules. He warped his voice with software until he questioned if it was still his, fluttering as it did through electric fractals or stretched until it seemed to trickle with sweat. And in a series of residencies in isolated cabins and the New York City art space Pioneer Works, he dove in and out of genres like never before, fusing ASMR readings and sampled voicemails to mutated disco and cherubic pop and orchestral emoting. A panoply of guests and friends—Arone Dyer, Greg Fox, Jeff Tobias, Richmond’s Spacebomb crew, among many others—helped him reach these unexpected syntheses.

Vulnerability and self-reckoning is the point of Birth of Omni, to make yourself and hopefully your kids and maybe even the world a little better by being honest about and open with yourself. Kinsella wrote, recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered this album alone, because these are notes to self, personal reminders of how he wants to exist moving forward. Birth of Omni began in the dark, but it exists now in the full light of an essential reality: Our roles change, as do we. There’s hope in knowing there’s still somewhere else to go.

Pre-Order Birth of Omni by Birthmark HERE