Dutch singer Charlotte Wessels and her band, now officially credited as THE OBSESSION, will release a new full-length album, Mute Swan Empire, on February 5, 2027 via Napalm Records. The musicians who first came together around the former DELAIN vocalist's 2024 album The Obsession have taken that title as their name after several years on the road as her live band.
Mute Swan Empire is a character-driven concept record. Each of its 15 tracks takes on an archetype emerging at the end of the Anthropocene, looking at how people react to climate breakdown, social injustice and the loss of the futures they expected: through denial, rage, faith, withdrawal, hope or vengeance.
Wessels says she didn't set out to make a concept album. Partway through, she noticed that her newest songs were all connected, each one standing for a different response to the world right now, and she followed that thread through the music, the artwork and the imagery. She adds that she wanted to explore the contradictions and gray areas rather than point fingers, and that the record ranges from some of the heaviest music the band has made to moments of real vulnerability.
The title plays on the myth of the swan song, the idea that a swan sings its most beautiful song just before it dies. Wessels asks what happens if humanity has pushed itself so close to collapse that it no longer gets, or deserves, that final act of grace.
The album was produced by Wessels and Joost van den Broek and mixed at Sandlane Recording Facilities, with guitarist Timo Somers helping on the arrangements and also playing bass on the record. Elianne Anemaat adds cello on several songs, and Vikram Shankar contributed orchestral and additional keyboard arrangements. The lyrics draw on medieval mystics Hildegard von Bingen ("In Leta Via") and Julian of Norwich ("The Hermit Song"), the Dutch "Denk Vooruit" campaign ("Emergency Kit"), Martin Niemöller's "First They Came" ("One Day They Will Come For You") and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Bells Of Lynn". The earliest song on the album, "Incantations", first appeared in a different form on Wessels' Patreon in March 2024.
Mute Swan Empire tracklist:
- Incubus
- In Leta Via
- Tempest
- After Us The Flood
- Good Girl (If You're Ready To Die)
- The Hermit Song
- Emergency Kit
- One Day They Will Come For You
- Weeping Madonna
- This Is Not An Opinion
- The Villain
- Let The Music Decide
- Incantations
- Starling
- Bells Of Lynn
The band's first European headline tour opens on February 4, 2027 in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium, and wraps on February 27 in Wessels' hometown of Utrecht, with AD INFINITUM vocalist Melissa Bonny as support. Before that, THE OBSESSION will play Brazil and Argentina in December.
THE OBSESSION are Charlotte Wessels (vocals, keyboards), Timo Somers (guitars, backing vocals), Joey Marin de Boer (drums), Otto Schimmelpenninck van der Oije (bass) and Nina van Beelen (keyboards, backing vocals).