Boston-based indie folk and alternative rock ensemble John Lebanon announce the release of their debut album, Kite Without a String, out June 12, 2026. Written across late nights between Boston and Beirut, and built over a decade of collaboration across Boston, Providence, and Lebanon, the album is a sonic arc of longing and light — a poetic study of distance, identity, memory, and the small, grounding moments that hold things together when the world feels unsteady.
This is music born between two worlds. And it sounds like exactly that.
Kite Without a String follows a deliberate emotional and sonic journey across its eight tracks — opening with the driving, urgent energy of a world in a kind of muted stupor, and moving gradually toward something more settled, more layered, and ultimately more grounded.
“Hurricane Eyes” opens the album with electric urgency — the outside world pressing in, forward motion shaped by forces beyond the individual’s control.
The title track, “Kite Without a String,” follows with a spacious, mid-tempo arrangement: direct, reflective, and centred on the delicate balance of letting go without losing your core.
“Maksour” — the album’s Arabic-language track and one of its most exposed, emotionally raw moments — is a personal reflection on Beirut, stripped back and unguarded. A quiet anchor at the heart of the record.
“Vermontier (Dusk Edition)” marks the pivot — built around bright 12-string guitars, it shifts the tone outward, moving from heaviness toward direction and release. The landscape brightens.
From here the album turns inward. “Mizuri” — layered, melodic, and centred on faith — features vocal contributions from Matt Deluccia and Gaby Carvajal Poisson. “Petit Pierre” expands the palette into fuller arrangements, finding stability in simple, everyday moments. “Self Made World” — the album’s folktronica peak — reaches an emotional high before settling into a smoother, more connected outlook built on mutual support.
The bonus track, “I Like to Play (17′ Vault)” — a stripped-back archival closer from 2017 — brings the record full circle: a reminder to stay grounded, stay authentic, and return to the simplest version of why any of this began.
The full arc — from inertia to clarity, from muted stupor to light — is both musical and deeply personal. Grit, vice, strength, love, earth, skies, and clouds. All of it.
John Lebanon began as solitary demos — the project of a songwriter navigating the distance between the underground scenes of Beirut and the alternative rock world of the American Northeast. Over a decade, it matured into a Boston-based ensemble blending the melodic nostalgia of the Levant with the textured grit of indie folk and alternative rock. The music has always been a documentation of two worlds — a search for truth, a guide home, a moral boost, a feeling that grounds expansive arrangements in something tangible and real.
For fans of Vampire Weekend, The Shins, Wilco, and Bibio, Kite Without a String offers exactly that combination of melodic warmth, lyrical depth, and sonic range.
