Hen Ogledd "DISCOMBOBULATED" LP

Hen Ogledd — the collaborative project of artists Richard Dawson, Rhodri Davies, Dawn Bothwell & Sally Pilkington announce DISCOMBOBULATED, their confounding and haunting new album set for release on February 20

It is perhaps their most complex and emotionally charged record to date, involving meditations on political tumult, personal crisis, and mental wellbeing in a world gone mad, yet also their most warmly inclusive and accessible.

“There’s something to Hen Ogledd that’s really not like a normal band,” says Richard Dawson. “It’s something… else.”

Hen Ogledd — named after the Welsh term for The Old North, the historical and political region encompassing what is now northern England and southern Scotland during the Early Middle Ages — coalesced slowly in the middle of the last decade. Dawson and Davies first began collaborating in 2013, but Hen Ogledd did not come fully into being until Pilkington and Bothwell were both involved ahead of 2018’s debut album proper, Mogic.

Third album DISCOMBOBULATED marks a considerable step forward in their evolution. The initial sessions for the record took place in early 2024, having been “rallied,” in Davies’ words, by drummer Will Guthrie to get into a room together to develop the various ideas each member had. Living in different parts of the UK, Hen Ogledd often must share sketches of music remotely before coming together to hammer them into shape — usually, as on this record, with producer Sam Grant at Blank Studios in Newcastle.

Along the way, the record was opened up to an extensive cast of contributors. We hear the voices of friends’ and band members’ children, field-recorded horses and insects courtesy of Chris Watson and David Reid, and the supple drumming of Will Guthrie; there are spoken word contributions from the likes of Matana Roberts, Truly Kaput, C. Spencer Yeh and Circle’s Janne Westerlund (in Finnish, naturally); saxophone from Fay MacCalman, trumpet from Nate Wooley and flute from Davies’ daughter Elliw.

“Maybe Hen Ogledd is more like a family than a band,” says Sally Pilkington. “There’s something really special about having kids’ voices in the music.”

Yet it would be a mistake to characterise DISCOMBOBULATED as familial in the twee-est or safest senses of that word. A quiet radicalism and fury at injustice is woven into much of its lyrical and thematic content. On the first single to be shared, “Scales will fall,” Bothwell’s urgent vocal leads the charge with her allusions to both protest history — the women at Greenham Common and Durham Miners’ Gala — and contemporary organising against corporate greed. Her vocal performances are among the record’s most striking, charismatic features.