Elanor Moss has announced her debut album, The Knife, The Needle, will drop on August 21st via Merge Records (Superchunk). Ahead of the LP’s arrival, Moss has shared the lead single/video, “Sarah Waiting in the Car.”

For Moss, arriving at The Knife, The Needle was itself a complex journey. Moss found herself adrift from her music, pursuing a sound as opposed to occupying the space she had already cultivated for herself. “Nothing felt right,” she recalls, “so I took the pressure off myself and tried to calibrate my relationship with songwriting and music.” The three years she spent writing the songs that make up The Knife, The Needle ultimately found her returning to her roots in and love for, as she puts it, “the music that made me really feel something; the music I wanted to be writing.”

“I spent a lot of time playing the guitar,” she continues. “I borrowed a four-track tape machine and demoed songs on it. I got really into short stories. The plain-spoken truthfulness of story writers like Raymond Carver really appealed to me and inspired me while I waited for the desire to write to come back. I started therapy again, where I was beginning to unpack my understanding of where I come from, how my family history plays out in the things I do and how I love and receive love. Out of the slowness and quiet of those rhythms came these songs.”

The first of those songs written for the album, “Sarah Waiting in the Car,” sets the tone, Moss’ delicate, contemplative guitar playing and the brushstrokes of Matthew Herd’s arrangement of an ensemble — Marcus Hamblett (horn), Jool Owen (horn), Andrew Stuart-Buttle (violin), Reid Jenkins (violin), Linus Fenton (double bass), and Herd (saxophone) — embellishing her intricately detailed lyrics with heart-rending gravitas as the song’s narrative turns, deftly, from a meeting at the bar to the aftermath of an abusive relationship, gentleness turning into violence.

“”Sarah Waiting in the Car” broke an almost year-long drought of writing songs,” says Moss. “It reignited that spark in me around songwriting, and felt like a breakthrough into something new and intriguing that I wanted to follow. It served as a bit of a guiding light as I re-entered a more consistent relationship with songwriting again; the north star of the album in a way.”

The Knife, The Needle concerns itself with the way relationships between people are transformed, complicated, and troubled by love. It’s devastating work, a feat of tight lyrical construction that is at once patient and vulnerable, opulently rendered and keenly felt. Remarkably, The Knife, The Needle emerged from a place of restraint, with Moss — staying in a cabin near her parent’s house in the Scottish highlands after initially recording an entirely different version of the album in New York City (“a bit rollocking,” she notes) — feeling the pangs of the album she hadn’t recorded — “quieter, weirder, more English.”

Elanor Moss
The Knife, The Needle
Tracklist
Merge Records

1. Fixer
2. Again, My Love
3. Sarah Waiting in the Car
4. Improvisation
5. You Are Coming Home Tonight
6. Secrets of the Universe
7. Clothes in a Hotel Sink
8. Louise
9. The Way That It Feels

Elanor Moss 2026 Tour Dates:

Tue. June 9 – Corfe Castle, UK @ Sandy Hill Arts *
Wed. June 10 – Norwich, UK @ Norwich Arts Centre *
Wed. June 24 – Mariefred, SE @ Skottvångs Grufva +
Thu. June 25 – Lund, SW @ Park Live
Fri. June 26 – Gothenburg, SW @ Ringön
Sat. Aug. 29 – Little Mongeham, UK @ Smugglers Festival
Thu. Oct. 1 – Glasgow, UK @ The Poetry Club
Fri. Oct. 2 – Leeds, UK @ The Attic
Sat. Oct. 3 – Manchester, UK @ Low Four Studio
Sun. Oct. 4 – Stroud, UK @ The Prince Albert
Tue. Oct. 6 – Birmingham, UK @ Hare & Hounds
Wed. Oct. 7 – Bristol, UK @ The Jam Jar
Thu. Oct. 8 – Cardiff, UK @ Chapter Arts Centre
Fri. Oct. 9 – Oxford, UK @ Common Ground
Sat. Oct. 10 – Ashburton, UK @ Field System
Sun. Oct. 11 – Brighton, UK @ The Folklore Rooms
Thu. Dec. 3 – London, UK @ Cecil Sharp House

* supporting Ye Vagabonds
+ supporting Amanda Bergman

Pre-Order The Knife, The Needle by Elanor Moss HERE