Pelican will return to action in 2022 after a few years of unintentional hiatus. The band has announced they'll reissue their first three albums featuring "rarities, never-before-heard outtakes, demos, painstakingly remastered audio, and more" via Thrill Jockey, and will hit the stage with original guitarist Laurent Schoeder-Lebec.
Schoeder-Lebec quit in 2012 and was replaced by Dallas Thomas, who recently left the band.
"Hey all – we hope you have been keeping as well as possible since our band slipped into unintended dormancy at the end of 2019. Though the world remains as erratic today as it was when we put our summer 2020 dates on ice, we're thrilled (if a bit cautiously optimistic) to announce our intention to get back to work this year, including a slew of dates in Europe this Summer with a few more to come later in the year.
"The dates include our return to Dunk!Festival, rescheduled appearances at Hellfest and Freak Valley Festival, and a handful of headline shows. As with most everything these days, these performances are contingent on mitigation of the ongoing pandemic, so we urge everyone to continue to stay safe.
"Though supply chain woes render the timing somewhat unpredictable, the shows will roughly coincide with a the first phase of a thorough and long-gestating archival project we've been working on over the course of the pandemic: deluxe reissues of our first three albums via their new label home Thrill Jockey Records.
"Details for these are still pending, but you can expect rarities, never-before-heard outtakes, demos, painstakingly remastered audio, and more. We are so excited for the opportunity to breathe new life into these formative works.
"The bittersweet aura hanging over these developments is that our longtime guitarist Dallas Thomas has parted ways with the band in favor of other pursuits. He's been an intrinsic component of our live shows since 2011, joining in 2012 as a full fledged member in time for his integral and indispensable contributions to 2013's Forever Becoming and 2019's Nighttime Stories. The band will not be the same without him and we can't thank him enough for the years of incredible shows, recordings, riffs, and wild stories he shared with us.
"We do have a solution in place for our 2022 dates which will hopefully allay concerns and come as a welcome development to longtime fans of the band: joining us for the upcoming shows will be founding guitarist Laurent Schoeder-Lebec. We haven't had the opportunity to share a stage with him since 2011 and we couldn't be more thrilled that he's agreed to get back into the thick of it with us.
"Seeing as the last two years of the band has been spent in a somewhat uncharacteristic mode of reflecting on our past, it feels like a synergistic development that we can now channel this same energy on stage, reflecting the past through the prism of the present."
