Time flies when you’re being Tunng. Can it really be over two decades since the band’s genre-blurring, self-styled ‘pagan folktronica’ first emerged from an east London studio courtesy of a clutch of Gilles Peterson-endorsed singles on the small but perfectly formed Static Caravan imprint? It surely can, and what’s more, January 2025 will mark the twentieth anniversary of This is Tunng… Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs, a debut longplayer whose acoustic guitars and poetic disquisitions on nature, mythology and the human condition, courtesy of Sam Genders, sieved through fellow band founder Mike Lindsay’s lattice of fractured beats and crackling electronics, still sounds like an impiously postmodern wedding of the rustic and the synthetic, the arcane and the futurist – one for which the designation ‘pagan folktronica’ is as good a shorthand as any.

 

Whichever way we choose to describe it, that 20-year-old signature sound makes a warm return on Tunng’s eighth studio album, Love You All Over Again, a winning amalgam of texture and melody, disconcerting imagery and shapeshifting production, predicated, Lindsay reveals, on a conscious reacquainting with the band’s first principles.  “I went back to the first two albums just to listen to how we fused genres – things like Davy Graham, Pentangle and the Wicker Man soundtrack, all of which I was discovering back then, together with Expanding Records [the Shoreditch-based repository of soi-disant ‘beautiful electronic music’], whose studio space we shared. That was all going into the early records. Over the years, Tunng’s sound has varied and twisted, but at the root there is always a flavour of what Sam and I made on that first album. Rather than searching for a new avenue we went back to what we used to do, which, after all this time, felt like it was a new avenue… Love You All Over Again is our way of coming full circle.”

 

And what a circle it’s been, one that has embraced global touring, chart-grazing singles (like live favourites ‘Jenny Again’ from 2006, the following year’s ‘Bullets’ and  2010’s ‘Hustle’), a jaw-dropping live collaboration with Tuareg desert blues combo Tinariwen (including two memorable Glastonbury performances in 2009 and 2010), and a catalogue of restlessly innovative albums for the Full Time Hobby label, beginning with folktronica exemplars Comments of the Inner Chorus in 2006 and Good Arrows in 2007. Subsequent longplayers would expand the Tunng palette, exploring more of a live band feel and embracing broader leftfield pop and psychedelic flavours, helping cement widespread acclaim and a loyal international audience in the process.

 

In between albums and tours, Tunng’s founders would work away from the band’s fold – Lindsay notably in his Cheek Mountain Thief solo guise and later in LUMP, a keening collaboration with folk imperatrix Laura Marling, while Genders absented himself from a brace of Tunng albums – 2010’s… And Then We Saw Land and 2013’s Turbines – to work on collaborative songwriting projects and on his critically lauded modern pop vehicle, Diagrams. The core duo would be firmly back in harness on the band’s sixth album, however, 2018’s electronica-heavy, tour-de-force Songs You Make At Night, and again for 2020’s ambitious and ingenious Dead Club.

 

If the latter – a an often droll, litterateur and philosopher-enhanced meditation on mortality, grief and loss, accompanied by an engrossing podcast series – inevitably had its moments of gravity, then Love You All Over Again is, in many ways, a buoyant, celebratory rejoinder. A collection of spirited, mellifluous if ever-so-lightly eerie songs, it’s an album that, according to chief lyric writer Genders, reflects a sunnier latter-day disposition. “I’ve always been interested in the contrast between the pain and darkness of life on one hand and its magic and wonder on the other. These days, I guess I’m more drawn to the latter… Lyrically, it was very much stream of consciousness, and the songs have a lot of recurring themes: taking solace in nature, people, connections and the way life can be confusing and painful and so incredibly beautiful all at the same time.”

 

The album began to take shape after an August 2023 Tunng appearance at Sicily’s Festivalle festival, the band’s first live performance since 2018 (“it was a one-off we couldn’t turn down”, they admit, cryptically, which sounds very Sicilian…) and was assembled over the following 12 months “in our usual jigsaw-puzzle way” at Lindsay’s Margate studio, with significant contributions from all six band members – vocalist Becky Jacobs, guitarist Ashley Bates, percussionist/woodwind player Martin Smith (“the real musician in the band” Lindsay observes, dryly) and keyboardist Phil Winter, all now long-established foils to the Mike/Sam axis. “The recording process actually started with me and Phil”, Lindsay recalls. “Then Sam arrived and brought the incredible fantasy song-ness. Then Martin came with percussion, clarinets and other flavours and Becky with her Becky tones. Ash was constantly sending me guitar, banjo and saw parts from his Somerset studio…”

 

Over time, the various in-studio permutations and shared files would cohere into a recognisable if reinvigorated Tunng sound world. Genders, long resident in Sweden, was only able to make a brief visit to the Margate studio and while in the past Tunng recordings were often developed from his songwriting blueprints, this time, things worked collaboratively and collectively from the outset. “I did send some completed songs to Mike early on, although I wasn’t sure we’d ever actually work on them – I just wanted to get the process going”, he reveals. “There were a couple that could have gone on the album, and we all discussed them, but they were essentially pop songs, and this isn’t a pop album.” Subsequently working together more spontaneously, Lindsay remains agog at the speed with which his partner could summon a narrative. “I would present Sam with just a sliver of music, and he’d come back with a complete lyric within an hour. All the things that were going on in his mind manifested immediately in these slightly nursery rhyme-like songs of ‘hopeful creepiness’… The stuff seemed to pour out of him, just like it always did.” A typically understated Genders concurs. “I was in the studio for four days and I think we wrote seven songs, all of which are on the record, which is pretty unusual…”

 

While Love You All Over Again represents a considered, if free-flowing return to Tunng’s stylistic and aesthetic rudiments, it is also a reflection of the magical cohesion the band have come to realise over time, particularly on stage. “There’s a bizarre chemistry between us”, affirms Becky Jacobs, “which is quite extraordinary given that we’re all very different – especially now that we’ve got kids and live in different parts of the world. And our tastes in music are quite diverse, even if there are things that overlap. Tunng has always been about Mike and Sam at the centre, but there’s something about the six of us – it just works.” Genders agrees. “Chemistry is not just about the individual abilities of the people involved; it’s about facilitating ideas. We always bounce off each other – there are some Herculean email chains… Tunng has always been eclectic; it’s Mike’s production that makes everything coherent.”

 

Whether it’s that ineffable esprit de corps, the meticulous studio craft or simply a turn of the karmic wheel, Love You All Over Again, with its folk-hymnal intimacy, its glimmering lights and long shadows, its unforced fusion of soul and machine, feels like a Tunng album for today – something of a familiar comfort in uncertain times and, equally, a record for the ages. While, as Genders contents, this is not a pop album per se, it is, nonetheless, as melodically generous and lyrically bewitching as it is eccentric and startling, and in its highly detailed, genre-melding production, and in the preternaturally timeless, reverb-less blend of Genders’ and Jacobs’ voices (sporadically joined by Lindsay and the rest of the ensemble’s distinctive shanty choir), as captivating as anything in the band’s considerable canon.

 

Opener ‘Everything Else’ sets the tone – interlocking folk guitars and keyboards, subtly off-kilter beats and poignant, horn-like synths wreathing lyrics of childlike wonder (“We run like kids into a storm… We’re high on life” emotes Genders in his wonderfully oaky Derbyshire brogue). The song “should be be a complete mess”, according to Lindsay. “One part is in 5/4 and another in 4/4. Together, they make this polyrhythmic mega loop. I then brought in the piano chords which are in 6/4. Somehow, it’s a magical meld…”

 

The ensuing ‘Didn’t Know Why’ manages to nod passingly to both Kraftwerk’s ‘Radio Activity’ and Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sound of Silence” in a dauntless face-off between metallic synths and pellucid guitar arpeggiation, all of it framing one of Genders’ typically faux-naïve earworm vocal melodies and lyrics about a familiar Tunng song character, Jenny, who on this occasion “swallows a car and the TV too”. Somehow, what on paper may seem like an awkwardly heterogenous hybrid makes perfect sense to the ear, its apparently incongruent elements gelling with a graceful effortlessness. “The song started out with a different guitar part”, Lindsay explains. “When Sam arrived, I doubled the guitars across three chords… it feels endless and very Tunng: dark but then warm and melancholic. Sam heard this and immediately brought back the murderous Jenny, who has appeared on two previous Tunng albums”.  Genders offers his take on Jenny. “She once represented a kind of romantic ideal – ‘the one’ – but now she’s a sort of every-person – a kind of archetype of all of us!”

 

The ensuing ‘Sixes’ showcases the aforementioned ‘Becky [vocal] tones’ and lyrics that proffer further childlike takes on ingenuous, glad-to-be-alive positivism (“our hearts keep beating again”), offset by Lindsay’s whirs and 1970s library music synth sounds (“preset number 27, ‘Sad Trumpet’, on the DX7, smothered in tape echo – there’s a lot of that on the album,” he reveals). Lindsay’s own song, ‘Snails’, with lyrics partially based on his marriage vows, no less, embellishes its mesh of acoustic guitars, banjos and woodwind with further intimations of optimism and almost Roald Dahl-like whimsicality (“Remember when you were a muddle?/It was the snails causing trouble”).

 

Elsewhere, ‘Laundry’ showcases another near-pointillist sound collage – choppy folk guitar riffs and chattering synths feature heavily – offsetting Genders’ lyrics of teasing ambiguity (“If you were the sky/If you were a tree/Then you’d surely die/As happy as can be”), latterly joined by a sonorous tone bath of interlocking woodwinds. In contrast, the succeeding instrumental ‘Drifting Memory Station’ is based on a mesmerising, counterintuitive piano loop (“the DMS is an incredible machine made by SOMA Laboratories that rearranges loops and creates generative rhythms”, explains Lindsay. “The title completely sums up the nostalgia of this album”). Doleful clarinets and scattershot electronics subsequently smelt another characteristically Tunng-esque alloy of the plaintive and the fidgety.

 

The almost forgotten ‘Deep Underneath’, follows, crafted in secret by Bates & Genders and sounding a little like the Incredible String Band might have if they’d somehow angled their muse toward Morr Music in the early 2000s, while ‘Levitate a Little’ is another showcase for Genders’ and Jacobs’ sepia-hued dueting and the former’s typically surreal imagery (“Twenty ravens in the basement/Eating crisps and drinking beer”).

 

‘Yeekeys’ dives back into mischievous electronics, it’s catchy, near-ravey synth riff eventually ceding to plangent stringed instruments and an almost Brazilian/retro-futurist feel, before Genders’ vocals enter to offer further, Edward Lear-esque allusions (“We’ll build a boat out of red wine and honey”). The closing ‘Coat Hangers’, meanwhile, features catchy acoustic guitar figures and shards of ‘refreshed’ band chat captured, amusingly, in a wardrobe “somewhere on tour” (“Only in Tunng do people – while residing temporarily in a wardrobe – have the wherewithal to capture the moment for possible use on a future album!”). Another charming example of folktronic bricolage, it ends in clouds of wistful, dolorous synth, like a poignant, valedictory veil being drawn over proceedings

 

Reflecting on the album, Genders regards it as a kind of embodiment of mature contentment. “I’m no longer in that position I was once was, where I’m thinking If I can’t have success as a musician, what the hell will I do?! I’m at the stage in my life, with my work and family, that if and when I get a chance to do Tunng it’s just a complete joy.

 

For Lindsay, the album gets to the very essence of Tunng. If you go back and listen to the early records, or the B-sides album (2019’s This Is Tunng…Magpie Bites and Other Cuts), there are some really odd tunes there – it’s all a mash-up of gubbins! For Tunng to work, it has to feel surprising, odd and unpredictable, and the new album has all that. It’s all about Tunng being back, as a family, within our original boundaries, bringing the love to all who have been a part of our journey over 20 years.”

 

David Sheppard

September 2024