Anti- have announced they’ll be releasing a new posthumous Sparklehorse album called Bird Machine on September 9th. The record was being worked on by Mark Linkous when he committed suicide in 2010 and has been completed by his brother Matt and sister-in-law Melissa.

As Mark began work on what he planned to be the fifth Sparklehorse album in 2009, he and Matt would talk through his plans for the record. Matt can clearly recall their conversations; Mark’s excitement about the influences feeding into it and the way the songs were starting to take shape. It was these conversations that Matt and Melissa – Mark’s sister-in-law, who had both worked with Sparklehorse – returned to years later as they began to sift through boxes of tapes to catalogue and preserve Mark’s unreleased recordings and bring his posthumous album, entitled Bird Machine, to life.

Several years later when Matt, Melissa and Bryan Hoffa, an audio preservation specialist at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, began the painstaking process of listening to and archiving Mark’s recordings, they found the ideas that Mark had discussed with Matt had been vividly and powerfully achieved. A number of the songs were close to completion, while others needed only careful encouragement – the addition of subtle instrumentation and accompanying vocals in some cases, another careful mix in others – to take flight. “It was as though the songs let you know,” says Melissa. “Mark communicated these songs. We just did our best to transmit them.”

It helped hugely that Matt and Melissa were able to work with a team of musicians – including Alan Weatherhead, who produced ‘Bird Machine’ with Matt and Melissa, Joel Hamilton who mixed the record, and Greg Calbi, who jointly mastered the final version – who had worked with Sparklehorse and cared deeply for Mark. And crucially, it felt clear to them that most of the record was already in place. Mark had given it its title and a track listing in handwritten notes received by Matt.

Check out the songs ‘Evening Star Supercharger’ and the previously released ‘It Will Never Stop’ below: