Wolves in the Throne Room have released Estuary, the title track and second song out from the album of the same name, with a video the band produced themselves.
What the video shows is the record's premise made literal. Mythical figures move through decayed concrete, collapsed railroad tracks and industrial ruins with brambles and ivy growing over them, and a blue heron watches the water where the salt and the fresh meet.
Nathan Weaver explains the choice without hedging. If wilderness overcame the cities, he says, the estuaries would be realms of power and magic, and within the world the album builds they are nexus points where magic has taken physical form, with spirits both good and evil walking the earth. That is a long way from the standard black metal position, which treats nature as the thing that destroys and leaves nothing.
An estuary is a boundary rather than a place, which is also what the band have been writing about for twenty years: the line between the built world and the one that outlasts it. Choosing the title track as the second single says they expect this record to be heard as a whole.