Credit: Press / Javier Morales
October 31st, 2026 · 1:20pm GMT
Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox has released ‘Octoberland’, which marks Atlas Sound’s first new song in 15 years.
Eagle-eyed fans will have suspected new music was on the horizon, as Cox took to the stage at Making Time festival in Philadelphia a month ago to perform live for the first time in seven years. The set consisted of eight brand new, unheard songs, one of which would have likely been ‘Octoberland’.
The song begins with some sweet-sounding keys, slowly accompanied by high-pitched and slightly off-kilter vocals about “witches burning” and a virus that “flies every night”. This same pattern repeats for two-thirds of the track until a subtle yet thumping bass protrudes underneath the keys and the lyrics become less frequent.
Cox wasn’t just responsible for the song, but they directed the music video as well. Just as eerie as the song itself, the footage is entirely black and white, and doesn’t show anything other than a strange figure draped in goo, which the camera steadily pans in on.
There is yet to be any album announcement; however, Cox has confirmed that they will be playing a run of festivals in 2027 as Atlas Sound. These include Big Ear’s Festival in Knoxville, Salt Lake City’s Kilby Block Party, and Primavera Sound in Barcelona.
They will be playing with Lockett Pundt, their fellow Deerhunter member who goes by the name Lotus Plaza.
Cox has been using the moniker Atlas Sound for years now, and said in an interview with Pitchfork all the way back in 2008 that the first song they ever made was done on their parents’ karaoke machine in the basement.
“Ever since I was a kid,” they said, “My parents had a karaoke machine that they had bought our family in some sort of failed attempt at family togetherness, and of course it just sat in disuse.”
Cox continued, “Eventually I discovered it in our basement. I realized, because I had read an interview with Beck, that you could take a cassette recorder and record one thing on the first tape, play it on the second tape, plug a mic in, and record along with the first tape onto a second tape, and just keep bouncing the tapes. And that’s how I invented the whole Atlas Sound thing, when I discovered the capabilities of multi-tracking and the fact that I didn’t need a band.”
Listen to ‘Octoberland’, the new single by Atlas Sound, below.
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