Based out Easthampton, Massachusetts, Stephen Pierce is known until now for his work in, “very loud” bands like Kindling and Ampere. Away from those projects, Stephen’s other musical love is the folk-rock music of the 60s and 70s, to the point where he’s even working on a book about it. That inspiration also manifests in his new solo project, Gold Dust, whose debut album is out next month. Ahead of that release today Stephen is sharing the latest Gold Dust single, Run Into Clouds.

Like much of Gold Dust’s debut album, Run Into Clouds is heavily rooted in a sense of exploration, particularly in this instance his newfound love of trail running, as Stephen explains, “there’s a mountain that rises over Easthampton that I find myself on top of most days now…the way you rise above cloud cover on those rainy days. It’s like the earth below has vanished or I’ve come out on the other side of some distinctly different reality”. He credits this particular track with kick-starting this album’s journey, recalling how “when Run Into Clouds started taking form, it felt different – Like I had figured something out”.

Listening to Run Into Clouds, you can almost feel the musical threads in Stephen’s mind starting to weave together, the traditional folk sounds colliding with his more modern influences. While the guitar has a traditional finger-picked style reminiscent of the British folk players of the 1960s, the production is a world away from that era, particularly palpable on the layered, reverberating vocals, which bring to mind Animal Collective or The Antlers. This feels like a musician at a great moment in their songwriting, in love with the past but never over-awed by it, and pushing Gold Dust’s sound into something fresh, exciting and entirely in its own image.

Gold Dust is out October 15th. For more information on Gold Dust visit https://golddust.bandcamp.com/.