SOAK, the stage name of Irish singer-songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson, has announced a new album titled decembers, due for release on 4 December 2026.
It will be the singer’s fourth album, following Before We Forgot How to Dream (2015), Grim Town (2019) and If I Never Know You Like This Again (2022).
The new album follows a period during which Monds-Watson was unable to sing due to an autoimmune disease. The journey explored across the record is not just a psychological one but a physical one as well, taking listeners across America, through Dublin’s frost-glistened streets at night, in search of a meteor in Portugal, and ultimately back home to Derry, Ireland.
“When I try to describe the album,” Monds-Watson explains, “I always go back to a quote from Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again where he says, ‘You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love… back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time, back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.’ I think for a long time I wanted to disprove that concept. I don’t know why I was so determined. Maybe the familiarity of before felt safe. In the end, I realised that was no way to live and had to learn how to lean into the rest of my life. In a way, I think decembers is about forgiveness.”
The nine-track album will include death valley fridge magnet, SOAK’s 2024 collaboration with Fred Again.. Today, the title track was released.
The rest of the album will include the songs speed, woodstock, minus 3, subaru, backroads, transmitter park and closing down.
