Auckland’s Sheep, Dog & Wolf is back with a new single – their first in four years.
The project of Daniel McBride, the two-time Taite Music Prize finalist, blends jazz, electronica, post-rock and avant-pop on the dreamlike “Sound of a Distant Wave”. The track drifts on clarinets, gentle percussion and a driving beat, conjuring a sound that’s as delicate as it is restless.
The song looks at memory and loss.
“Memory is such a strange and unstable thing,” says McBride. “That’s thrown into sharp relief when you’re losing someone close to you. When the stakes feel that high, it can be hard to accept that all things fade and distort with time. Sound of a Distant Wave is about looking for ways to hold on.”
The single follows 2021’s Two-Minds, McBride’s second album to earn a Taite Music Prize shortlist spot, and recently named one of Rolling Stone AU/NZ’s 80 Best New Zealand Albums of the 2020s So Far (check out the full list of albums here).
“Daniel McBride wrote and recorded his most recent album as Sheep, Dog & Wolf over a three-year period, fine-tuning his lush arrangements at his own pace,” the review notes.
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Two-Minds “is an endlessly ambitious record that finds McBride deftly mixing jazz, folk and electronica to create soundscapes wholly his own. A true original.”
McBride’s 2014 debut Egospect won the Critics’ Choice Prize at the Aotearoa Music Awards and earned his first Taite nomination (he lost out to Lorde that year).
Classically trained in saxophone and self-taught on just about everything else, McBride has been writing and recording since he was 17. His debut EP Ablutophobia, recorded between high school classes, drew praise from The Guardian and Vogue Italia, which called him a “young Sufjan Stevens”.
Sheep, Dog & Wolf’s “Sound of a Distant Wave” is out now.
