Star Moles – “Born Again” [Video]

Video · Dead Oceans

Star Moles Signs to Dead Oceans, Shares the Mythologizing “Born Again”

Emily Moales’ Philadelphia project announces a new label home and a first vinyl pressing of the acclaimed Highway to Hell, due December 4.

By most measures, Star Moles has been one of the year’s best-kept open secrets. Emily Moales’ Philadelphia project landed on best-of-2026-so-far lists at Stereogum, Paste, Brooklyn Vegan, and Rolling Stone on the strength of Highway to Hell, a record of psychedelic-of-center bedroom pop songs that Pitchfork called “full of miracles and false starts.” Today the secret gets a bigger stage: Star Moles signs to Dead Oceans, who will give the album its first vinyl pressing on December 4, and shares “Born Again,” the first new song since the album’s release.

“Born Again” was recorded and mixed by frequent collaborator Kevin Basko at his Historic New Jersey studio, and it arrives fully formed. Shot in South Philly and directed by Lucky Marvel, the video grounds the song in the specific geography that has defined Moales’ recent work. She has been making music since 2017, cycling through fantastical and conceptual modes before landing somewhere more direct: songs about her actual life in Philadelphia, about religious fanaticism and environmental collapse and the particular texture of the present moment. “Born Again” fits that frame while pushing at it a little. It is at once rooted and restless.

Moales describes the song as a painting of real frustration, one that reaches for myth because the feelings themselves are already exaggerated. “Trying to tell the truth in a song by saying ‘here’s what happened’ isn’t satisfying to me,” she says. “Born Again” is what happens instead: a strong voice, mythologizing words, and the kind of melodic instinct that Rolling Stone flagged earlier this year as what makes Star Moles worth watching. The vinyl announcement makes it official. Dead Oceans knows what they have.

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