Portland duo Mint Julep will release their sophomore album, Broken Devotion, on February 12th via Unseen Music. Ahead of the official street date, the record is streaming in full below.

Broken Devotion comes almost five years after the band’s debut, 2011’s Save Your Season. Part of the wait was due to multi-instrumentalist Keith Kenniff’s solo projects as Goldmund and Helios. The other reason is because he’s married to Mint Julep vocalist Hollie Kenniff, and there’s only so much pressure a couple should put on their relationship.



“It’s been great for Hollie and me to bond over making music and to have that music feed into our relationship,” Keith said, noting he started the band to get his wife singing. “Writing music can be stressful, but there’s that joy that comes from creating something that you know you’ll have for a really long time. We can finish an album and move on, and then go back years later and let the songs tell us what was happening then, what we were feeling. It’s a cool way to mark all these very specific moments in our lives together.”

On Broken Devotion, those moments are captured in soaring electropop, a lush evolution from the shoegaze influences suffusing Save Your Season. That slow-burning aesthetic hasn’t entirely been washed out, however, and is present on tracks like “Twilight Still” and “Slow Spiral”. Elsewhere, as on “Incinerate” and the title track, there’s an urgency that gives the duo’s sound a new, brighter tint.

“The theme of Broken Devotion is losing and letting go of something you had sworn yourself to,” Hollie explains to Consequence of Sound. “What that means. The modern world is full of casual love. This is about the kind of love that tears you apart.”

Pre-order Broken Devotion via Mint Julep’s website, and take a listen to the whole album below.