Imitating Aeroplanes, the supergroup featuring members of The Wombats and Team Me, have announced their debut album and premiered a new track called ‘Hourglass’.

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The band features The Wombats’ Tord Øverland Knudsen and Team Me’s Marius Drogsås Hagen, who are childhood friends and grew up together in the Norwegian town of Elverum.

The pair will release their debut album as Imitating Aeroplanes, titled ‘Planet Language’, on September 22 via Propeller Recordings.

‘Hourglass’ is the record’s lead single. Knudsen said of the track: “‘Hourglass’ was written in my parent’s basement, which took us back to where it all started, like a couple of 12-year-olds just nerding out and playing music again.”

The song is inspired by Japanese folklore character Urashima Tarō – a fisherman who went to visit the underwater palace of Ryūjin and returned to his village to find himself 300 years in the future. Hagen added: “The lyric is kinda dark, but it’s optimistic in the sense of just living in the now, and always looking forward, and making the most of this small fragment of time that we have.”


‘Planet Language’ was influenced by a series of “red wine and prog nights”, where the duo explored the works of bands like Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd and King Crimson. “The whole idea of this album was to do things we haven’t done before, and things that we couldn’t do in our existing projects,” Knudsen said.

Hagen continued: “It feels like one hell of a journey, both lyrically and musically. It’s all about travelling in different ways – whether in music or in life – and somehow finding bits of home wherever you are.”