Splendour aside, it's as dead as a dodo on the touring front here. However, the good news is that there's plentiful new music about. Yesterday we gave you a round-up of the best new action to be had, but since then, there've been a couple of other releases come to light. Yay. More of this soon, but for now, the most exciting news is the return of Swedish ex-pat and current Melbourne resident Mr Jens Lekman. 

He's releasing a new single called ‘The End of the World is Bigger than Love’, which you can get via his website. In the accompanying blog post, Lekman explains that the song’s origins date back to 2008 when he was living in New York, when he felt “everything I touched was turning to shit... and I needed to hit rock bottom so I could work my way back up again”. The song is, he says, “a song of hope... I believe in love, I just get so wrapped up in it sometimes that I need to put it into proportion.” 

Even by Lekman's standards, the song is a sombre affair, cataloguing the end of a relationship against the backdrop of living in a foreign country. But as ever, it’s enlightened by his inimitable lyricism: “A broken heart is not the end of the world/Because the end of the world is bigger than love/It’s bigger than an iceberg/The plume of a geyser/It’s bigger than the spider/Floating in your cider”. 

We’ve helpfully embedded the widget from his website that allows you to sign up and get the song at the end of this paragraph, ...but you should also head over to said website and download Jens’s (northern) summer mixtape, entitled ‘A Summer in 3/4 Time’. It’s been the soundtrack to The Vine’s last couple of working weeks and is highly recommended. Here's where to sign up for a copy of the new single:


Fair warning - it seems to take a while to register the email address and send you a download link - so here's a live version to tide you over while you wait: