Photo by Steven Rood

Phish keyboardist Page McConnell has announced a new solo record, Maybe We’re The Visitors, which will feature ambient electronic music. The album will come out this Friday, Apr. 9. In addition to the announcement, McConnell shared a single from the record titled “Radio Silence.”

The album is one of several studio release McConnell has been involved in over the course of the pandemic. Now over a year ago, he – along with his Phish bandmates – surprised released Sigma Oasis, which was announced on Apr. 1, 2020 and released the next day on Apr. 2. Months later, McConnell and guitarist Trey Anastasio collaborated on December, an album made up of album existing Phish songs rearranged for just acoustic guitar and piano, which was released on Christmas Eve of 2020.

The album also marks McConnell’s third solo effort; he released a self-titled record in 2007 and an instrumental album, Unsung Cities and Movies Never Made in 2013.

Music journalist David Fricke provided the liner notes for Maybe We’re The Visitors. He reveals that the album’s origins lie in a trip McConnell took to Iceland in early 2020.

“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 as the keyboard player in Phish: a holiday in Iceland,” Fricke wrote. “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.”

Listen to the new single, “Radio Silence,” below.