God May Relent is my third "proper" album, following 2007's Yonder! Calliope? and 2019's Angus, After All, and the first of the three to be produced without any sort of collaboration with anyone else. It was conceived, written, and recorded during a period of severe mental illness and grief and isolation that ate up most of the first three months of 2020, released out into the world just as the world itself was buckling under the weight of a global pandemic and a series of increasingly surreal horrors that meant severe mental illness and grief and isolation became the colours of the hours of the days for us all.

I had always intended to release an album in March 2020, and had recorded a fair bit of one, an album called March If Nothing Else, which was also the name of a track that I had recorded with Jennifer Gasperich a few years before for the "Your Face Breaks My Heart" EP, released in the wee hours of Paddy's Day 2015, exactly five years before God May Relent. That album-that-wasn't, as grim a fucking sludge of a thing as has ever stank up my skull, was recorded in various states of downer-dosed derangement and lethargic stupor in late 2019, its sundry sournesses strewn now in bits and pieces about my hard drive. It resembles God May Relent only in that it also features a couple re-writes of songs that had first appeared on Yonder! Calliope? In all other ways it inhabits a different universe altogether, and I'm quite happy for that universe to keep it.

God May Relent itself has undergone some revisions since it initially appeared. Most obviously, the artwork is completely different. I made that change because, fond as I was of the half-arsed scribbled Sebastian(e) that used to be there, the sonic and thematic correspondences between this album and And Ye Are Not Your Own, the album that I released a few months later, are so pronounced that in the end I decided to create new artwork for both, pulling them into line with other visually to underscore those other connections..

It's also the first time that I've used an actual photograph of myself on any album or EP artwork since away back when the aforementioned Yonder! Calliope? came out a hundred million years ago.

As far as the music itself is concerned, everything that was on the album when it first appeared is on it still, and is largely as it always has been, although some minor, non-intentional imperfections have since been removed from a couple numbers, and the tracklisting has been shuffled about a bit to make room for "Mon Charlie, Sing Down Through," a song which I originally released on Bandcamp alongside "Nearest The Mouth" as a free-to-download two-track single, but that I always felt should have been on God May Relent, and so now it is.

If you'd prefer to have it as it was when it was first uploaded on the evening of March 17, 2020 (barring the couple of glitches I removed soon after, although if you really want those glitches then, I dunno, message me or tweet me and I'll sort you out), the original tracklisting looked like this:

Song For Teresa of Ávila
Nearest The Mouth
Oh, To Tremble
Patton's Fields
The Most Of Me
No Matter Her Place
'Gon Miss Me, Never Mind
Perhaps, Sebastian
Song For Tonight

So that's that, but while I'm here I'll take the opportunity to thank absolutely everyone who has supported this album in whatever way. It means the world to me, especially given the circumstances of its creation. Thank you.

-Aaron, 24-01-2021