Morphine's Lost 1998 Album 'Cocoon' Arrives December 4 on Partisan

Morphine will release "Cocoon," an eight-song album built from sessions the Boston alt-rock group abandoned in 1998, on December 4 via Partisan Records.

The LP marks the band's first full-length since "The Night," which DreamWorks issued posthumously in 2000. Singer Mark Sandman died of a heart attack on stage at the Nel Nome del Rock festival in Italy in 1999, and Morphine officially disbanded that year.

What was on the original tapes?

Producer Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, Morphine's longtime studio team behind Radiohead's "Pablo Honey" and Hole's "Live Through This," recorded the 1998 sessions. Kolderie later returned to the tapes with Sabine Hrechdakian, Sandman's partner, who helped assess the material.

"I was astounded by the sound of the tracks when I put them up at the studio where we transferred them," Kolderie said in press materials. "It really felt so right to be bringing them back from the crypt into the world again."

How does the band sound different this time?

Unlike the rock-minimalist catalog Morphine built around a two-string bass, baritone sax and drums, the recovered tracks incorporate piano, guitar and several drummers. Kolderie delivered new mixes to bind the old sessions into a coherent record.

Saxophonist Dana Colley laid down new parts for three songs, threading the surviving members into tracks that predate Sandman's death by more than two decades.

"Coming back to these recordings years later was a surreal experience," Colley said. "It was like having one foot in the past and one in the present, with my saxophone bridging the gap."

Who else plays on the record?

• Jerome Deupree, returning cofounder
• Billy Conway, his replacement on drums
• Additional drummers on the 1998 sessions

"The Night" had been the group's first LP cut as a quartet, with both Deupree and Conway contributing percussion.

What does the album mean to Sandman's partner?

Hrechdakian described the home studio where many of the songs originated.

"Mark loved performing and traveling the world, but he also loved to come home and cocoon," Hrechdakian said. "It was our home and his studio, so there was always music happening, tape running, friends dropping by at all hours, lots of cooking."

She connected the title to the lyrics themselves.

"The lyrics speak to the hardship of being away from loved ones while the band was on tour and the joys of homecoming," Hrechdakian said. "There's also this thread of space travel that runs through the album, so I imagine the cocoon as a kind of spaceship for two who leave the world and return to it."

Why does the release matter now?

The album closes a 27-year gap between abandoned material and finished record, and gives Morphine listeners an eight-track window into the band's working life at the end of the 1990s. With an archival clip for the title track already online, "Cocoon" arrives as the first official Morphine studio LP built from sessions that predate Sandman's death — a project that began in the year before the singer lost his life on stage.