Morphine are back with a new album, and this one's built from the vault. Mark Sandman, the late frontman with that deep, lascivious baritone and the two-string slide bass, remains one of rock's true one-of-a-kind figures. He fronted a jazzy Boston band who sounded like no one else, before or since. Their 1993 gem Cure For Pain is a stone classic, and the run through those four albums still hits like nothing on your shelf. Sandman died from an onstage heart attack in Italy in 1999, and 2000's The Night arrived as a posthumous farewell. That felt like the last word.
It wasn't. More than a quarter century later, a new record called Cocoon collects recordings Sandman made before his death. That's the moment here: fresh material from an artist gone too soon, a band frozen in amber suddenly moving again. New Sandman tracks in 2025 sounds impossible.
It's real, and it's coming. Get ready for one final low-end dream.