Marina Allen has announced her third studio album, Eight Pointed Star, out June 7th via Fire Records, and releases the lead single/video, “Red Cloud.” Additionally, she has announced June headline shows in New York City, Los Angeles and London, and will be supporting Real Estate and Ben Howard on upcoming runs. Across two introductory records, the Los Angeles-based songwriter and musician has ripened a rare harvest, but her third studio album is an arrival home. Taking fragments and stories from Marina’s past, Eight Pointed Star welcomes an assembly of images, deftly weaving together a new future, in what feels for all the world like a glittering, clear-eyed modern classic of alternative folk and americana. Her songs hold a dynamism that conjure distinctive worlds of their own. This album is about discovery, searching with the eight points of a compass; about hope, gazing at the emanations within the eight points of a North Star; and about ancestry, being comforted by the eight-pointed stitching patterns used in quilt-making.

Allen’s first single from the new record, “Red Cloud,” embodies the patchwork approach, written about her mother’s family in the Nebraskan prairies, named after the small town and birthplace of writer Willa Cather. Her voice ducks and dovetails, wavering to speech when she sings of being made coffee and burnt bread. The great plains she paints are barren and desolate, but fertile in her mind. It’s the place from where her sense of identity originates; here, she cherry-picks stories from dreamlike panoramas, crafting her own false histories, the truth caught somewhere in between. Trust is the centrifuge around which themes of love, family and folklore unfurl across the album. Dust is kicked-up from the red scarred earth and, with it, an inexplicable calm settles over these nine songs.

“The imagery surrounding Nebraska has always been really vivid for me. My mom would tell me about how my grandma would ride a pony to school named Daisy. I guess it brought an awareness of how much the world has changed in such a short time, but it also really tripped me out as a kid,” she says. “We’d be watching The Wizard of Oz and I felt like Dorothy was my heritage. So much of your family narrative defines who you are, and so much of it isn’t true, or you hear it wrong, or you only pick up this one part, passed down by somebody else who only picked up one part. I wanted to play with that. I had all of these images swirling around me, with me at the center, and none of the sources were reliable.”

In the “Red Cloud” video, directed by Eliel Ford (known for his work with Wes Anderson, Baby Keem and Travis Scott) and shot on 35mm film in Northern California, these centric themes unfurl as Allen’s rolling vocals rise and fall across open plains, beaches, and a cold winter forest – her voice pure and crystalline.

Marina Allen Tour Dates:
Fri. April 5 – Montreal, QC @ Beanfield Theatre *
Sat. April 6 – Toronto, ON @ Masonic Temple Concert Hall *
Sun. April 7 – Detroit, MI @ El Club *
Mon. April 8 – Milwaukee, WI @ Vivarium *
Wed. April 10 – Minneapolis, MN @ Fine Line *
Thu. April 11 – Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall *
Fri. April 12 – Cleveland, OH @ The Roxy at Mahalls *
Sat. April 13 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr. Smalls *
Mon. April 15 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club *
Tue. April 16 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer *
Wed. April 17 – Boston, MA @ Royale Boston *
Thu. April 18 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall *
Fri. April 19 – Norwalk, CT @ District Music Hall *
Sat. April 20 – Woodstock, NY @ Levon Helm Studio *
Thu. June 13 – Los Angeles, CA @ Scribble
Wed. June 19 – New York, NY @ Union Pool
Fri. June 21 – London, UK @ The Slaughtered Lamb
Mon. June 24 – Stockholm, SE @ Cirkus ^
Tue. June 25 – Oslo, NO @ Sentrum Scene ^
Wed. June 26 – Copenhagen, DK @ DR Koncerthuset ^
Sat. June 29 – Nijmegen, NL @ De Vereeniging ^
Sun. June 30 – Groningen, NL @ SPOT / De Oosterpoort ^

* w Real Estate
^ w Ben Howard

Pre-order Eight Pointed Star HERE.