Atlanta’s Washed Out released “The Hardest Part” on June 5th. Ernest Greene — who goes by the stage name Washed Out — will release his fifth album, Notes From A Quiet Life, on June 28th via Sub Pop. He says, “‘The Hardest Part’ is a story about nostalgia and love lost.” In 2021, Ernest left the big city to return to the countryside he knew growing up and named the former horse farm he moved to “Endymion” (after the pastoral John Keats poem about a lovesick shepherd — its opening line: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”). It has shaped all that he’s created there, from his music to his albums’ creative direction to his planned large-scale visual-art experiments. That purity of vision is what makes Notes From a Quiet Life so potent. The self-produced album was mixed by Nathan Boddy (James Blake, Mura Masa) and David Wrench (Caribou, Florence + the Machine).