Lily Seabird’s "The Afterglow" Is The Feeling of a Room After Someone’s Left It

Photo by Noah Lenker

Grief looks a lot of ways to a lot of different people, and it doesn’t always show up on a schedule. Sometimes it shows up while you’re getting coffee, and someone in line looks like someone you lost recently. Other times it’s getting home, and it’s a stack of overdue bills when you just lost your job.

That’s a little bit like how “The Afterglow” came to be. Lily Seabird wrote it in one sitting on the day she learned of folk icon Michael Hurley’s death. The song, which is out now with a video directed by Tes Galluci, is the newest look into the world of her upcoming album, Lightspheres on Their Way. The new record is due out September 4th on vinyl and October 2nd digitally via Lame-O Records. Where the record’s first two singles, “Election Day” and “Portal to the Past,” emphasized leaning into drive and tension, “The Afterglow” is a relieving exhale. It’s quite possibly the quietest thing on the record so far.

This track folds in more than one kind of loss. Seabird has said that part of the lyrics imagines the perspective of a stranger who crashed a car through the fence of the house she was living in at the time on a place she’s taken to calling “trash mountain” (we definitely recommend checking out her last record by the same name). Hurley’s death and that car accident happened within weeks of each other, and “The Afterglow” does an incredible job of holding memories and drawing you into the feelings of both.

Seabird found her video collaborator by random chance, or what some might call fate, since she saw Galluci juggling on the street downtown, and the pins caught her eye. They looked like the “lightspheres” that made their way into the album title. She describes a lightsphere as any presence that keeps returning to reshape a life. It could definitely be a literal light, sure, but it could also be a person, relationship, or a memory that won’t stay put. I’m sure many of you reading this have someone or something that comes to mind as your own personal lightsphere; I know I do.

Lightspheres on Their Way was tracked in a matter of days at the start of 2026, alongside co-producer Garrett Linck at his home in rural Maine, and the band worked around a woodstove carefully and lovingly on this new project. Lily is on piano, horn arrangements, and layered guitar throughout; cellist Eliza Niemi appears on four tracks, and a harmonium that turned up unexpectedly during the sessions made it onto the record too.

Lily Seabird has said the album’s most emotional moments aren’t the lyrics but the instrumentals. These long, unhurried stretches where the songs seem to let go of language altogether are where the album's emotions pique listeners' ears. That tracks with everything else we know about the record: that it’s one about mortality that keeps finding its way back to reverence, built by someone who trusts silence and space and lets them show emotion in their own way.

Lily will head out to the UK this month, playing End of the Road Festival and a run of headline dates that leads up to The Lexington in London on September 3rd, followed by an acoustic in-store performance at Rough Trade West the next day. From there she’ll be on some U.S. dates opening for Black Country, New Road, then back to Europe supporting Greg Mendez.

“The Afterglow” is the feeling of a room after someone’s left it: not empty, exactly, but just changed. It’s a fitting way into an album that seems less interested in answers than in learning to sit with what lingers.

Preview Lightspheres on Their Way below: