Hear Noah Gundersen's sweeping new tune 'Bad Desire'

At the beginning of 2016, Noah Gundersen had an anxiety attack on stage. As he recalls, he was flooded with a feeling of dread: “I don’t want to keep doing this,” he recalls thinking. “I don’t want to keep playing this kind of music or these songs — they don’t resonate with me now as a person [or] as an artist.”

So he hit the creative reset button. Moving away from the confessional, singer-songwriter fare that made up his first two LPs, he began treading in more ambiguous, metaphorical waters. “It took me a long time to reach a place where I was writing something that I felt was different,” he says. But the energetic results will take their bow on Sept. 22 as he releases his third full-length, White Noise. EW is excited to premiere the set’s second single, “Bad Desire,” below.

Inspired by the touring life of a musician and the toll that schedule inevitably takes on the people artists leave behind, the cut sees Gundersen contemplating the many forms of, as he says, “a lot of the pseudo relationships that people find themselves in now with the way that online dating works and the ways that we’re kind of getting away from traditional relationship trajectories.”

Many of those themes, especially our relationship with technology and how it affects our other relationships, continue across White Noise‘s 13 tracks. But fans shouldn’t expect any answers, or preaching from the Washington state native. “It’s something I’m still trying to figure out,” he admits. “There is this catharsis and almost pleasant numbing of everything [with technology] that allows us to be distracted and to not ever have to be alone but, at the same time, it is making us, I think, less connected than we could be to one another.” He adds, of how that shows up on the album, “I wanted to capture a sense of what it felt like to me.”

“Bad Desire” is streaming exclusively on EW, above. White Noise is available Sept. 22 via Cooking Vinyl. He has also shared “The Sound,” off the forthcoming collection. The singer has also announced a fall headlining tour. Those dates are listed below.

Sept 11 – London, England – The Borderline

Sept 12 – Manchester, England – Night & Day

Sept 14 – Berlin, Germany – Auster Club

Sept 15 – Amsterdam, Netherlands – Bitterzoet

Oct 5 – Boise, ID – The Olympic

Oct 6 – Salt Lake City, UT – The State Room

Oct 7 – Ft. Collins, CO – Armory

Oct 8 – Denver, CO – Bluebird Theater

Oct 10 – Minneapolis, MN – Fine Line Music Cafe

Oct 12 – Madison, WI – High Noon Saloon

Oct 13 – Milwaukee, WI – The Back Room at Colectivo

Oct 14 – Grand Rapids, MI – The Pyramid Scheme

Oct 15 – Toronto, ON – The Opera House

Oct 17 – Montreal, QC – The Belmont

Oct 18 – Boston, MA – The Sinclair

Oct 20 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall Of Williamsburg

Oct 21 – Asbury Park, NJ – Wonder Bar

Oct 22 – Philadelphia, PA – World Café Live

Oct 24 – Washington, D.C. – 9:30 Club

Oct 25 – Charlotte, NC – Visulite Theater

Oct 26 – Nashville, TN – Cannery Ballroom

Oct 27 – Chattanooga, TN – Revelry Room

Oct 28 – Atlanta, GA – Terminal West

Oct 29 – Asheville, NC – The Grey Eagle

Oct 31 – Birmingham, AL – Saturn

Nov 2 – Houston, TX – The Heights Theater

Nov 3 – Dallas, TX – The Kessler Theater

Nov 4 – Austin, TX – Barracuda

Nov 6 – Phoenix, AZ – Crescent Ballroom

Nov 8 – Los Angeles, CA – El Rey Theatre

Nov 9 – San Francisco, CA – Great American Music Hall

Nov 10 – Eugene, OR – Hi-Fi Music Hall

Nov 11 – Portland, OR – Wonder Ballroom

Nov 12 – Vancouver, BC – Imperial

Nov 17 – Seattle, WA – Neptune Theatre