Land of Talk – the Montreal-based band led by Elizabeth Powell – has announced its first new album in seven years, Life After Youth, set for release May 19th on Saddle Creek. Produced and mixed by John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Sonic Youth) and Jace Lasek (Besnard Lakes), and featuring Sharon Van Etten, Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Sal Maida (Roxy Music/Sparks), and The Besnard Lakes, the album is a collection of songs that sees Powell in the finest voice of her career, and reuniting with original Land of Talk drummer Bucky Wheaton.

Since forming Land of Talk in 2006, the one certainty in Powell’s life has been uncertainty, as her band has gone from being one of Montreal’s most brash, buzzy indie rock acts to one of its most elusive and enigmatic. After recording Land of Talk’s debut EP, Applause Cheer Boo Hiss, she lost her drummer. After releasing Land of Talk’s first full-length record produced by Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Some Are Lakes (2008), she lost her voice. And after the release of the “breakthrough” (SPIN) Cloak and Cipher LP (2010), Powell lost her will.

Powell knew she needed a break from the album/tour/album/tour cycle after Cloak and Cipher’s release —she just didn’t plan on it becoming a full-blown hiatus. In 2011, she left Montreal behind and retreated to her grandparents’ cottage near Lake Couchiching, ON to write only to see all her work lost when her laptop irreparably crashed, taking all her demos down with it. The combination of post-tour fatigue and the demoralizing loss of her new material brought her to a dead stop.

It wasn’t until years later that Powell reunited with Wheaton, who emailed her out of the blue after falling out of contact for several years, and together began woodshedding new songs in Toronto at Broken Social Scene/Do Make Say Think bassist Charles Spearin’s home jam space, and then booking time at Montreal’s Breakglass Studios with Lacek, who recorded the first Land of Talk EP (and, for this new record, shared bass duties with wife/bandmate Olga “Oggie” Goreas).

The story of Life After Youth resembles one of those Raiders of the Lost Ark maps with the red routing lines bouncing back and forth into a blur—“which is kind of like what my brain is like,” Powell says with a laugh. But from that mental and geographic scramble, a work of great focus and clarity has emerged. To paraphrase the late David Bowie, it’s been seven years, and Powell’s brain hurt a lot. But she stands today as the patient-zero case study for Life After Youth’s therapeutic powers.