Tunng

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.

Have a listen…