Siren Section return after 8 years with new album ‘Separation Team’
Siren Section
Los Angeles duo Siren Section have released their long-developing concept album “Separation Team“, a 19-track digital full-length that arrives roughly eight years after their previous album “New Disconnect”. The record is out now on all platforms.
“Separation Team” grew from unfinished material written nearly a decade ago. When the band revisited those ideas, they found that the older fragments aligned closely with their newer work, allowing the songs to be shaped into a single concept album.
The project took a decisive turn when vocalist and synth player James Cumberland was hospitalized and survived a life-threatening episode. The band used that period of recovery to complete a record that handles transformation, survival, and the cost of attaching yourself to something larger than your own identity. The band adds: “The title “Separation Team” can be read as a break-up story, but also as a study of dissociation, solidarity, and the shared escape found in destructive relationships or fractured versions of the self.”
The band deliberately uses repetition and looping structures to show how ideas and identities get worn down over time, describing repetition as a way for meaning to “accumulate rather than resolve”.
Ahead of the album release, the band issued “Flinch” as a single, accompanied by a lyric video which you can see below.
Musically, “Separation Team” offers a mix of industrial, post-punk, shoegaze, IDM and experimental electronic elements which the band describes as “glitchgaze”. On the album itself the duo layers guitars, synths, drum machines and noise loops into dense arrangements.
The album was produced by James Cumberland and co-produced with Nels Jensen. All instruments are performed by Cumberland and Dowling, with acoustic drums by Bryan Steinmetz. The mixing was handled by Mike Schuppan, and the mastering by Tom Baker at Baker Mastering.
About Siren Section
Los Angeles-based duo Siren Section formed out of a long-running collaboration between James Cumberland and John Dowling, who first started playing together in high school in the mid-1990s. Early work under the name Jinsai led to the creation of Siren Section in 2010, with the project gradually crystallising around a combination of shoegaze-leaning guitars, post-punk rhythm work and an experimental electronic production.
Musically the band situates itself between post-punk, shoegaze and electronic rock, describing their sound as “glitchgaze”.
Siren Section’s debut album “All we want all at once” appeared in June 2014, initially self-released digitally via Bandcamp and later issued on vinyl.
They followed this with “New Disconnect” in October 2017, a nine-track release written, produced and mixed by the band, with mastering by Johnnie Truesdale and additional contributions from trumpet player Phil Rodriguez and sound designer Peter Day.
After “New Disconnect”, the duo reduced their release activity but continued working on new material. They returned in 2025 with the single “Glass Cannon”, merging industrial pop and shoegaze. It was the first teaser for “Separation Team”.
“Separation Team” isthe third full-length in their discography, released in February 2026 as a long-form concept album developed from both older and recent compositions.
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