Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser to release first new music in 13 years on Record Store Day

Elizabeth Fraser

Cocteau Twins frontwoman Elizabeth Fraser, who has undergone a slight reemergence in recent years, will release her first new music in more than a decade on Record Store Day via a “finally finished” 12-inch vinyl EP featuring five songs by Fraser and her partner Damon Reece.

The project finds Fraser and Reece — a drummer who played in Lupine Howl, Massive Attack, Spiritualized and the Ian McCulloch-less version of Echo & The Bunnymen — recording under the name Sun’s Signature.

The self-titled Sun’s Signature EP will be pressed on black vinyl and packaged “inside a single sleeve jacket and printed inner sleeve” — and will be limited to 8,000 copies worldwide, according to Record Store Day UK’s listing. Of those copies, 3,700 will be available in the U.S., according to the EP’s listing on the American site.

The EP is to be released by Partisan Records on April 23 exclusively through independent retailers participating in Record Store Day, although Rough Trade’s website notes that unsold Record Store Day titles will be available online via its webstore beginning at 8 a.m. Eastern on April 24.

Not much is yet known about Fraser’s new music with Reece, though at least one of the songs appears to have been previously released, though possibly in a different form. The first of the EP’s five tracks is “Underwater,” the same name as an electronic single Fraser released in the U.K. in 2000.

And two of the other songs — “Golden Air” and “Make Lovely the Day” — appear to have been performed by Fraser during her rare sets at the U.K.’s Meltdown Festival in 2012, along with “Underwater,” in appearances that had been billed as mixing new music from an anticipated solo album with Cocteaus classics.

The new music will be the first released by Fraser since her one-off 2009 single “Moses,” a song she’d written with Reece with their friend Jake-Drake Brockman that was released following Brockman’s death that year in a motorcycle crash.

The EP’s release comes after Fraser has become more musically visible in recent years.

She first reemerged publicly in September 2018, performing a set of traditional folk songs in London in an exceedingly rare live appearance. She then spent part of 2019 on the road with Massive Attack on the band’s Mezzanine anniversary tour, lending her vocals to the tracks she performed on that album.

Later in 2019, she performed a duet with British folk singer Sam Lee on a new, Bernard Butler-produced recording of ancient folk song “The Moon Shines Bright.” In 2020, she contributed backing vocals to the solo single “Cannibal” by Sigur Rós fronman Jónsi. And last year, she teamed up with Oneohtrix Point Never on the single “Tales From the Trash Stratum.”

Below, check out the Sun’s Signature EP artwork and tracklist — as well as Fraser’s 2012 performances of three of the songs that appear to be on the release.

Sun’s Signature, Sun’s Signature

Side A
1. “Underwater”
2. “Golden Air”

Side B
1. “Bluedusk”
2. “Apples”
3. “Make Lovely The Day”

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