Page McConnell will release his new solo album, Maybe We’re The Visitors, digitally this Friday, April 9. A vinyl pre-order will be announced soon. The album was written and recorded in Iceland and Burlington, VT. Listen to the album’s first song, “Radio Silence,” which David Fricke called in his album notes “an overture of slowly dawning arpeggios that dot the void like hopeful transmissions.”

In January 2020, shortly before the coronavirus shut down modern life, including travel, McConnell took a road trip that had nothing to do with his normal touring itinerary: a holiday in Iceland. Inevitably, music got made there. But it was unlike anything McConnell had recorded before as a solo artist, for side projects or within the collaborative energies of Phish: fully electronic pieces created on location, in response to the epic landscapes, dramatic weather, and geologic fury that he experienced in Iceland. He also came back energized and determined to keep going amid, indeed despite, lockdown.

Maybe We’re The Visitors is the result: an imaginary voyage charged with eyewitness awe and intense, solitary reflection; expressed without lyrics, vocals or any sign of piano, organ or clavinet.

The narrative flow of Maybe We’re The Visitors – exploration, colony and, finally warning; that, as Icelanders already know, we are only stewards here and nature always has the last word – did not present itself “until I was close to the end,” McConnell confesses. “But I always knew there was something alien about these pieces…”