EPK
TWO DARK BIRDS
Dreamers of the Golden Dream (Vol. 1)

Album Release Date: February 27, 2026
Label: Vfib Recordings
Press and Radio: Team Clermont
Instagram: @twodarkbirds 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/twodarkbirds/
Contact: info@ltlmtn.com

About The Album

Recorded at The Woods studio near Woodstock, NY, Dreamers is the fifth album from Two Dark Birds—exploratory, dense, hook-driven, moody, exhilarated, comic, and open-hearted. Lyrically, it seeks out the meeting point between the inner life and the wider world. Musically, it’s boldly eclectic yet always swinging for the fences.

“Girl of Summer” sets the tone: a poignant portrait of a single moment—this moment, the forever-moment—radiating outward. “Good Boy Good” follows as a hook-laden pop gem (imagine Nick Lowe meets Spoon at Abbey Road), a rare salute to do-right guys. “Born to Fall” unfolds as a story of fractured family bonds, echoing both Sly Stone’s “Family Affair” and John Phillips’ Wolfking of LA. Elsewhere, the ballad “Sunbruise” drifts toward Cave/Cohen/Ferry terrain, while “The Law” delivers an American koan wrapped in blistering folk-rock.

The album closes with “The Song to End It All,” a true epic that begins with a hungover caveman in prehistoric France and ends inside a Bob Seger fever dream. Across ten minutes, it channels the anger, absurdity, and uneasy spirit of the times.

Stay tuned for Volume 2—arriving Summer 2026. 

Lyrics: View Here >

About Two Dark Birds

Two Dark Birds is a band from the Catskill Mountains led by songwriter Steve Koester and drummer Jason Mills. They are joined by Josh Roy Brown (lap steel), Tyler Wood (keys), Iris Clementine (vocals), Mark Lerner (bass), Jeff Hill (bass). Since 2008, they have released four critically acclaimed albums, as well as the 2022 EP Porous.

Prior to Two Dark Birds, Koester fronted the bands Punchdrunk, Koester, and Maplewood. The music has been called "knockout gorgeous" and "timeless... great rock music" and has received glowing reviews everywhere from Fader and Nylon to The Village Voice and The New York Times, showing up on year-end Best Of lists in Magnet, Popmatters, Rhapsody, Disclaimer and more. Koester has also written, recorded and produced a wide variety of songs for TV and film, including features in Sideny Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows Your Dead” and Laurie Collyer’s “Sherrybaby.”

PRESS ON TWO DARK BIRDS

• “One of this year’s most subdued and moving releases.“  - The Big Takeover

• “Strange and beautiful. It’s a record heard best with a beer in hand beneath a star-punched sky.“ - Nylon

• “A luminous and ambitious collection of poet-grade and quietly experimental folk music.”  - HV1

• “Poised, structured, self-aware, ambitious.”  - DVeight

• "...there certainly is a magic to it, a kind of backwoods witchery that only the best of the style can really capture. " - Culture Collide

• “…brimming with pastoral energy and light. There's a quiet dignity to the songs, no grand or elaborate veneering.” - Chronogram 

• “… takes on the populist challenge of the form: how to be at once folk-accessible and lit-deep, how to wed image to experience and emotion without ever getting too fine or too poetic for the idiom. Koester hits the mark again and again…” - Woodstock Times

VIDEOS