Blitzen Trapper prep new LP (watch the "Dead Billie Jean" video)

Folk rock vets Blitzen Trapper will be back with Holy Smokes Future Jokes on September 11 via Yep Roc. It’s a bit of a concept record, inspired by George Saunders’ 2017 book Lincoln in the Bardo with main man Eric Earley pondering the limboland between a person’s “separate lives on earth” and “what it means to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth.”

We’ve got the premiere of “Dead Billie Jean” which works in the title star of Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit — not to mention a few dead rock stars — into the heady psychedelic universe of this album. Early gives us a little insight: “Pulling together Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo and MJ’s Billie Jean wherein the real Billie Jean has indeed killed herself as she promised Michael she would and now living in a state of rock and roll immortality kicks it in the Intermediate States with Jim Morrison, Brian Jones and Abraham Lincoln(?!) smoking mad dope, though she remains unaware of her death somehow as though her death ultimately was an awakening and reinvention.” Are you not intrigued? Also also a groovy, jammy Blitzen Trapper-style folk number. Watch the video for that, and listen to two other songs off the record, below.

Holy Smokes Future Jokes tracklist:
1. Baptismal
2. Bardo’s Light (Ouija, Ouija)
3. Don’t Let Me Run
4. Magical Thinking
5. Masonic Temple Microdose #1
6. Requiem
7. Holy Smokes Future Jokes
8. Sons and Unwed Mothers
9. Dead Billie Jean
10. Hazy Morning