Bristol-based psychfolk trio Hands Of The Heron will release their third studio album Quiet Light via their own community label Cuculi Records on 22 November 2024.
The band, Bec Garthwaite, Beth Roberts and Claire Vine, who featured in Prog's Limelight pages and also at last year's Summer's End Festival, have also shared their current single, Evergreen.
"I began writing this song in 2017, before I really considered myself a songwriter," explains Roberts. "I’d been in Athens for nearly a year volunteering with asylum seekers and refugees. I was surrounded by a lot of trauma and felt compelled to help in any way I could, so I completely overworked myself until I was totally burnt out. When I came home I was exhausted, depressed and had taken on what I now know as secondary trauma. I didn't have any language to express how I was feeling or understand how to make myself feel better and didn’t feel like I deserved support as I had chosen to put myself in that situation. The song emerged from that place in lots of fragments - I thought they were all different songs, but Beth and Bec helped me weave them together into a whole song."
Talking about the new album, she adds, "We each have ideas that are bigger than what any of us can do individually, and we transform them together. When one of us brings a seed idea to the other two, it already contains the potential for the whole - we start from these specific strands of poetry and melody, and then the arranging is done as a collective. Some of the songs are hugely transformed in the process, but we stay true to the feeling of the initial idea, shaping the arrangement around the original concept to fully express its themes."
Quiet Light was recorded at The Roost in Bristol during spring 2024 in collaboration with co-producer Rowan Elliott. The band will release a new single, Pieces Of Me, on October 25.
