The Unthanks – In Winter

Double vinyl LP pressing housed in gatefold jacket. 2024 holiday release. With most pieces drifting into the next, In Winter is a dream-like winter fantasia, embracing both the dark and the light in the most ritualistic of seasons. Moving in and out of focus, like a memory, it's a bittersweet hymnal to our shared winter experience. This is the band's sixteenth album but a world in itself, capturing the warmth and nostalgia of the festive season, the chill and darkness of the winter months, and the reflective ritualisms of the turn of the year; the end and beginning of the circle of life. In typical magpie style, The Unthanks collect and reimagine with deep musical intelligence, at once unique and familiar, inventive but natural and effortless. You will hear what a Tyneside band playing a German Christmas song in the style of The Beach Boys sounds like (O Tannenbaum); a Spanish carol performed by English folkies through the filter of Tom Waits (Carol Of The Birds); a French carol given desert blues menace, a newly written tribute to the NHS to the tune of O Holy Night (Nurse Emmanuel); an opening piece inspired by A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten (In Winter's Night); traditional wassails and old stories colored with folk noir and traces of Vincent Guaraldi's Merry Christmas Charlie Brown.

1. In Winter's Night
2. O Tannenbaum
3. Dark December
4. Gower Wassail
5. The Holly and the Ivy
6. O Come All Ye Faithful
7. Carol of the Birds
8. Carol of the Beasts
9. The Cherry Tree Carol
10. Bleary Winter
11. In the Bleak Midwinter
12. The Snow It Melts the Soonest
13. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
14. Coventry Carol
15. River River
16. Nurse Emmanuel
17. Tar Barrel in Dale
18. Greatham
19. Dear Companions

Label: Rabble Rouser

Catalog: 9309312

Genre: Folk