Beirut return with a beautifully mournful and melancholy ballad about a mystical South Seas island paradise that vanished from the map.

I’ve always been drawn to the melancholic sound of Zach Condon’s voice. I can even forgive him for playing my least-favourite instrument, the ukulele, whose jaunty twang drives this song.

Thankfully, he also plays two types of trumpet, a useful contrast to the jaunty twang of the ukelele, alongside the euphonium, mandolin, accordion, various keyboard instruments and a conch shell.

This new song comes from his band Beirut’s forthcoming album A Study Of Losses, described as “an 18-track odyssey” commissioned for an acrobatic stage show by a Swedish circus company, itself based on a German novel of that name.

It’s an ambitious project, a concept album containing 11 songs and seven extended instrumental themes named after the lunar seas, inspired by the chilling tale of a man obsessed with archiving all of humanity’s lost thoughts and creations.

In songs like the previously released Caspian Tiger and Guericke’s Unicorn, Condon writes about disappearance, preservation and the impermanence of everything known to us – extinct animal species, lost architectural and literary treasures, the process of aging and other abstract concepts.

This tune, Tuanaki Atoll, explores a Polynesian paradise that strangely vanished from the South Pacific in the 19th century.

Condon explains: “The Tuanaki Atoll is said to have been an Eden-like island somewhere in the South Pacific that mysteriously disappeared under the sea during an earthquake in the 1840s.

“Its inhabitants were described as a people so peaceful and generous that they had no word in their language for such things as war or murder.”

He adds: “It might be almost too obvious a choice but nothing could fit the island vibes better than a sweet and breezy ukulele which became the foundation that I built this song around.

“Contrastingly yet somewhat fittingly, the lyrics took on a darker edge and ended up reflecting that side of the story. Maybe because personally I doubt that such an Eden-like place could ever exist on Earth.”