Tennyson wrote of “Nature, red in tooth and claw”, and it is an idea Snow Ghosts appear to have taken to heart on their fourth album, The Fell, out this week. The British trio are back with more of their despairing, sinister sounds that fuse folk with experimental electronic noise, but on The Fell their fascination with the British landscape, ancient tales and ancestral spirits reaches perhaps its fullest expression. The boxing hares on the LP’s cover, at first glance suggestive of National Trust gift-shop bucolic whimsy, instead signify struggle and death and the unbreakable link between the natural and human worlds.
Snow Ghosts have always been interested in the atavistic, and their electronic atmospheres, variously with ambient, doom, trip-hop and industrial flavours, have often also accommodated traditional instruments to produce other-worldly, cinematic records fitting of a folk horror film soundtrack. Gloom, tension, foreboding and a deep sense of unease have been their calling cards, as Hannah Cartwright contributes her siren-call vocals and Ross Tones his ice-cold and queasy sonic environments (their solo projects, Augustus Ghost and Throwing Snow, give Snow Ghosts their name). Oli Knowles, of solo project The Keep and keyboardist for experimental psych band Sex Swing completes the trio.
Snow Ghosts’ 2013 debut, A Small Murmuration, was a deeply unsettling listen, with opening track The Hunted laying their cards on the table by building to such a crushing sense of impending doom that it achieved the rare thing of being music that was genuinely frightening. With song titles like Gallows Strung, Murder Cries and Untangle Me the album took the listener to some very dark places indeed.
While the songs on A Small Murmuration felt like mini horror movies, the lyrics often painting fleeting vignettes of gothic tales, 2015’s A Wrecking was far more abstract in both sound and narrative, using imagery of the sea as a metaphor for all life’s “wrecks”. Yet the album displayed the same power to unnerve as their debut, the sonic tsunami of a track like On Knives having a truly hair-raising effect. 2019’s A Quiet Ritual hardly got any more sunny, dominated by themes of death and grief.
The Fell is billed as “a collection of old folk songs that were never written”. It certainly sounds ancient in places, as on the a cappella opening of Magpie (“I plucked a feather from a magpie’s tail/ And I vowed never to see love fail” is a pretty traditional folk conceit), and not least on the recent dulcimer and bodhrán-laced single Buried. But while there are also other traditional instruments here – the Indian esraj and the Middle Eastern daf drum among them – it is the electronic sounds that manifest “The Fell as a living thing”, as Tones has put it, his origins in Weardale and the north Pennines fells having inspired the theme.
“Bewitching” is a word that sums up this album. Curse is a song of huge foreboding and melancholy inspired by folk tales of shapeshifting women. Avine finds Cartwright’s lilting vocal evoking the soaring flight of birds, underpinned by droning strings and with a lyric again suggestive of anthropomorphic creatures (“So give her back her raven eyes/ The only way she knows to cry”). Vixen also humanises its animal subject, but strikes a more hopeful note musically.
But with closing track Taken, a much more intimate song than Snow Ghosts’ usual massive sounds, the ominousness creeps back in. As Cartwright sings, “Where was the trust you promised us?/ You pulled down the world on top of us”, the breakdown of society seems to loom and the tumultuous events of the last three years hove into view.
The trio were dispersed during the pandemic, and the album was written in Wiltshire, Gothenburg and County Donegal, and the UK’s departure from the EU also hung over the process. “Like so many others we were just so shocked, and as musicians it felt like our futures became unforeseeable,” Oli Knowles has explained. “It would’ve been impossible to not include a song that was born of the political climate in the UK at the time.” The furious strings of Home are the result. “They are empty, the promises you have made,” Cartwright sings, “You can take our land/ But I will still remain.” Here, a sense of loss of land coalesces into a concern with the loss of animal habitats and environmental disaster.
The post-apocalyptic world is usually depicted as one where nature has regained dominance, with the remnants of defunct and dangerous technologies as the background. As a record that embraces sounds ancient and modern and that is equally pulled between an earthy past and an uncertain future, The Fell is a soundtrack for a dark age.
The Fell is released on Houndstooth on February 24.
SNOW GHOSTS in five songs
Lost at Sea (2011)
The unbearably tense eponymous track of Snow Ghosts’ maiden EP finds vocalist Hannah Cartwright delivering lyrics with the feel of a magical incantation while seething synths evoke a bleak and threatening seascape.
And the World Was Gone (2013)
Snow Ghosts are at their most cinematic on this track, with a field recording of a thunderstorm providing its backdrop and compellingly moody cellos. It was picked up by MTV for an episode of Teen Wolf in 2013.
Vetiver (2016)
The band embraced Krautrock and post-punk influences on this track which used rock drums and distorted guitar to create something more accessible but still compellingly dark.
Rip (2019)
Conjuring the despair and rawness of grief, this lead single from A Quiet Ritual featured the Iron Age Celtic instrument the carnyx, while the album’s cover art featured the National Museum of Scotland’s Deskford carnyx in particular.
Buried (2023)
The latest single from The Fell displays Snow Ghosts’ folk cred, sounding like a centuries-old traditional song. Vocalist Hannah Cartwright has called the track “a threnody to all the stories and lives lost to the landscape.”
Playlist: tinyurl.com/TNESnowGhosts
