Night Teacher, has announced her new album Year of the Snake, will arrive on October 31 via First City Artists (Coco). Night Teacher is the project of songwriter and vocalist Lilly Bechtel and producer Matt Wyatt. The album’s title refers to the Chinese Zodiac of 2025—a time for transformation. The album is a glowing invitation to grow, an illumination of the animal motivations that compel us forward, and a reminder to hold grace and space for the process. Ahead of the album’s arrival, Night Teacher has shared the track “Never Better.”

From Lilly Bechtel:

In the past few years, I started noticing how often I would think or talk about myself like I was some kind of renovation project. I always had this list of things to do before I could consider myself fully improved or somehow finally ‘fixed.’ When I realized how much this wasn’t about circumstances as much as a part of my personality, it made me feel a little sad and a little free. Because it’s as serious as it is ridiculous—how much of my own life I can miss while I’m on my way to being somewhere, or someone, else.

The artist is a trauma-informed teacher—of yoga, breathwork, meditation, collage, and poetry. “I get a lot of comfort and clarity from remembering that humans are also animals. The primary, oldest parts of our brains are far more concerned with safety and survival than we may realize, or be able to articulate,” she shares. Bechtel is focused on how those ancestral mechanisms manifest in the body. By attending to what she calls the “subterranean, preverbal, somatic intelligence whispering to us all the time,” she creates a space for healing that doesn’t require one’s pain to pass through verbality. “It’s not always possible to make sense of trauma with language. But you don’t have to put words to your story in order to feel seen, or held, or safe.”

Bechtel is speaking from personal experience. She spent the better part of her adolescence in isolated, therapeutic settings and treatment centers, struggling with eating disorders and substance abuse. Art became the means for healing her own trauma, and healing the trauma of others became her life’s work. She has led poetry workshops in women’s correctional facilities, taught breathwork in veterans hospitals, and instructed yoga classes with a focus on physiological trauma in rehabs, nursing homes, and Kindergarten classrooms.

Night Teacher
Year of the Snake
Tracklist
First City Artists

1. Never Better
2. Humanimal
3. St. Cecilia
4. World Too Close
5. Lipstick and Gold
6. Past Life
7. New Cage
8. Barbie in Bethlehem
9. Everything I’ve Had
10. Ecdysis

Pre-order Year of the Snake HERE