Season of Glass: loss with a sharp edge
Yoko Ono's 1981 album, out now via Secretly Canadian, is 17 tracks of deliberate grief. It is meant to be hard.
BY JOLT Staff · JUL 17 2026 · 1 min readSeason of Glass is a document of loss, and it does not want to be easy. Yoko Ono's album, dated 1981 and out now through Secretly Canadian on July 17, 2026, runs 17 tracks and just over an hour. The titles set the tone before a note plays: Goodbye Sadness, Mindweaver, Nobody Sees Me Like You Do, Mother of the Universe, Walking on Thin Ice. The album does not hide its weather. It wants to be read in order, like a hand held up.
The tracklist is the argument. Half the tracks come in under four minutes, short and blunt on the page, and the few longer songs carry the weight. Even When You're Far Away runs 5:21. She Gets Down On Her Knees runs 4:15. Mother of the Universe runs 4:31. Then Walking on Thin Ice, the centerpiece, takes up seven full minutes and lands at track 15. The sequence asks you to cross a lot of small, sharp pieces before the ice. That pacing is deliberate, and it is the record's best evidence for itself.
The ending is the miss. After Walking on Thin Ice, Season of Glass appends a 2:12 demo of I Don't Know Why and a 3:42 alternate version of Dogtown. Those final tracks are archive. They add context without adding force. The album would be harder and cleaner if it stopped at track 15. As it stands, the closing minutes soften the gesture and blur the focus the tracklist worked to build.
The record's central claim still holds. The scope is big and human: goodbyes, mothers, universes, thin ice, no, no, no. The language is plain and the shape is careful. A demo and an alternate version cannot cancel the nerve of the tracklist. This is a difficult album on purpose, and it stays difficult.
Season of Glass is unpolished. It is kept, glass and all, and it asks you to show up. You should.
