Hen Ogledd announce new album 'Free Humans' with new single "Trouble"

It is with great pleasure that Weird World announce Free Humans, the forthcoming album from Hen Ogledd, due for release on September 25, 2020. Along with the album news, the band—Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington—has shared new single “Trouble”, listen below.

Following on from Hen Ogledd’s previous album Mogic, with its digital overtones and themes of artificial intelligence, Free Humans takes a deliberately organic and natural approach. Inspired as much by ABBA as the work of 12th century mystic-composer-naturalist-visionary Hildegard von Bingen, touched equally by the spirits of radical philosophical plumber Mary Midgley and PC Music star Hannah Diamond, as quiet as the paintings of Agnes Martin yet bombastic like a Werner Herzog documentary, it’s an album of seamless, glorious contradictions. Tackling themes of love, friendship, Gaia theory, sewers, the nature of time, human stench, and the thrills of wild swimming, it’s remarkable that, given the intense collision of influences and wide-ranging ideas at play, Free Humans somehow coheres into a marvelous whole.

Free Humans doesn’t shy away from the fact humans are killing the earth, but it does it with spiky wit. Hen Ogledd manages to hold both the tragedy of the wrongs happening in the world, and a sense of hope and liberation, in their hands at the same time.

Listen to it and you might just glimpse something like tree-consciousness. Listen to it and different layers and membranes and atmospheres will reveal themselves. This is not background music. It was made at a Lagrange point—the zone between the moon and the earth where gravity is cancelled out—so what you hear is the push and pull between structure and chaos, refinement and accident. Contradiction is the name of the game.