Music Industry News

Tom Lark (Shannon Fowler) has released his sophomore album, Moonlight Hotel. The record follows 2023’s celebrated Brave Star and features focus track ‘Dive On In’.

Previous singles ‘Fuselage’, ‘Rock & Roll Baby’ and ‘Dumb Luck’ sketched out themes around historical displacement and change. ‘Dive On In’ pivots within theme, to connect those tunes to and talk about present-day concerns.

“‘Dive On In’ is about climate anxiety, feeling powerless to say or do anything to steer the planet’s course,” says Fowler. “We can see day-to-day the effects of climate change and below each damning article is an ad suggesting you buy even more plastic junk off Temu.

“The bridge of the song expresses frustration at dismissing science as folklore or ghost stories. ‘Dive On In’ is almost a morbid slogan for accepting a depressing truth – but more to provoke the question: is this what we want?”

Moonlight Hotel sees Tom Lark explore the parallels between Fowler’s family’s historical displacement following the 1929 earthquake that destroyed Murchison – a pioneer town in the upper West Coast of the South Island – and his own following the 2011 earthquakes that levelled much of Ōtautahi.

Steeped in the Tom Lark persona’s whimsical yet pragmatic sensibility, Moonlight Hotel is an evolution of what Brave Star introduced: sun-soaked odes to taking things as they come, and rolling with the punches.

The album has been announced alongside dates for the first live Tom Lark shows in Aotearoa since May 2024.

Moonlight Hotel is out 4 April 2025.

Check out all things Tom Lark below:
Instagram
YouTube
Spotify