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.
"Evergreen’ arrived while I was recovering from a breakdown and reconnecting with myself, others and the natural world. It was partly inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, who wrote ‘your joy is your sorrow unmasked/And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears/And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain’, explains Roberts. "I was discovering that my capacity to find joy and meaning was greater than it had been before I got ill, but so was my appetite and desire for solitude."
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.
