Released: 14th October 2022. Perhaps you heard. The most important and best loved British folk group in the last 20 years have been on the road since mid-April 2022 showcasing Sorrows Away. The anticipation for the delayed record release is all the greater, after nights like the London Palladium show, which climaxed with a mass sing. On many other nights too, in Edinburgh and Dublin, Newcastle and Nottingham, sold out audiences already on their feet for a standing ovation, would sing the album title, sonorously, defiantly, again and again, while the band presided silently, with wide smiles and the odd tear, before rejoining in chorus for one last time.
On the one hand, it shows that a band who have been making us cry for nearly 20 years, have done the unthinkable and made some music of joy and light! Inviting us after two years of Brexit, Covid and no live music to banish our 'sorrows away', The Unthanks have turned two simple words into a prayer - a cathartic incantation to sing at the top of our voices, from the depths of our souls - SORROWS AWAY! - sending us home feeling like we have seen off the past, welcomed in the new and reconnected with one another.
In the first summer of lockdown, The Unthanks lost their studio to property developers. Producer and band leader Adrian McNally had to relocate home in order to find new space. Sorrows Away was recorded entirely at home near Hexham, Northumberland and is perhaps the most complete Unthanks album to date, showing greater contrasts between light and dark, joy and sorrow, intimate and epic, bitter and sweet. There is also archetypal Unthanks territory - rich, tender, exploratory and long-form.
The extraordinary response already from live audiences to Sorrows Away is an early indication that the record is at the very least going to breeze the daunting task of following up the BBC Folk Album Of The Year 2015, Mount The Air. Described as 'an epic that Sigur Rós or Elbow would be proud of' by Drowned in Sound, and 'as good as it gets… music that asks you to consider everything you know and un-think it' by Folk Radio, Mount The Air was awarded 5 stars by The Telegraph, R2, fRoots and Songlines, and 4 by Mojo, Q, Uncut, The Times, Independent and Guardian.
The Unthanks tells stories that capture children. They make music cutting edge enough to be BBC 6Music regulars. They can be equally found on Radios 2, 3 and 4, reframing history and drawing together the worlds of folk, jazz, orchestral, electronic and rock music. The believability storytelling is admired by some of our best storytellers - Mackenzie Crook, Maxine Peake, Nick Hornby, Martin Freeman, Robert Wyatt, Charles Hazelwood, Ben Myers and David Mitchell, to name a handful. Sorrows Away is perhaps both the pinnacle and yet just the latest in their story so far.
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