Winter Aid announces release date of sophomore album Pull The Sky Inside

San Francisco-based Irish songwriter Shane Culloty, aka Winter Aid, has announced that he will release his long-awaited sophomore album, Pull The Sky Inside, on May 17.

The album announcement follows the release of two 2024 singles, 'Silk' with its optimistic ascending piano line last month, and the strings-y '20th and Mississippi' last week.

Pull The Sky Inside promises to deliver an album that will see Culloty stretching his songwriting extremities.

The Winter Aid musician is reportedly working with producers Larry Crane (who has previously worked with the likes of Elliott Smith and  The Decemberists) and Chuck Johnson to "weave in electronic sonic strands and new percussive elements" into Pull The Sky Inside.

Discussing the latest single, Culloty offered, “'20th and Mississippi’ was inspired by a painting by the same name by a San Francisco artist, Robert Bechtle, of an intersection near my home. It captured the isolation and bleakness that descended as the pandemic dragged on. The deepening anxiety I found myself dealing with after the pandemic, along with an episode in the mountains, when I attempted to escape it all.”

Having uprooted from Dublin to San Francisco with his wife, assimilating to life in a new city and country shortly led into the pandemic, which, between lockdown, elopement, and immigration form-filling, delayed new musical activities. That gestation period, though, led Culloty to his most realized collection of songs. Pull The Sky Inside captures that sense of displacement: feeling a bit unmoored and out of place, but constantly trying to explore new scenery. Its a record with one foot in Culloty’s homeland back in Ireland, while very much a reflection of his new surroundings and making sense over everything going on around him. “Inner Sunset” and “Dusk” appeared last month’s EP, the former the very first song Shane wrote in his new home.

Winter Aid reemerged last autumn from a period of relative quietness to first celebrate the 10th anniversary of his debut, The Wisp Sings, whose title track single has garnered over 3 billion posts, before dropping his first collection of new in 5 years, the Inner Sunset EP, in January.

Pull the Sky Inside track listing:

1. Dusk
2. Secret Sister
3. Mother Jones
4. Technicolor
5. Silk
6. Interlude for Jena
7. Papercuts
8. Mammoth
9. Holy Mary
10. Inner Sunset
11. 20th and Mississipi
12. Bonfire
13. Dragging a Church up a Hill
14. Pull the Sky Inside