Progressive Rock
Esoteric Antenna · 25 September 2026
“For A Rainy Day” (6:18) opens on solo grand piano with the voice coming in over the top before the strings arrive, and it’s the longest of the eleven: nothing else here gets past 5:32. Hammill has gathered material recorded in different places between 1991 and 2026, with the arrangements and lyrics reworked over the past few years. He puts it this way himself: “These songs have been a long time in the gestation and making… They seem to hang together as a group, even though there’s a wide range of styles represented here.”
“Heavy Weather” (4:23) was the first track out and the one that sounds least like the Hammill of the home studio: eighties-textured synths with the voice riding over them. The song is about Ukraine, and an earlier version had already been sold on a limited CD at his Tokyo shows in October 2023. “Red Flags (In The Sunset)” (3:12) goes the other way: a three-chord rocker with a riff that sticks, about which he says it “goes back to a Nadir-ish feeling” — that is, to 1975’s Nadir’s Big Chance.
The record is played, recorded and produced by him alone, as it has been for decades. The one exception is “The Wheels” (5:32), co-written with Saro Cosentino, who was also involved in the recording. It closes with “And When He Ran” (2:34), the shortest track of all, written for the death of his dog Bentley: “Sometimes you have to write a song because that’s what you do, but I wasn’t sure at first whether I’d even make it public.”
Forty-six minutes split across eleven songs, eight of which don’t reach four and a half minutes. Through the middle stretch — “Angle Of The Curve” (3:36), “So Much Water” (3:33), “Tabula Rasa” (3:45), “Oh The End” (3:20) — the record changes register every three minutes or so and none of those four has the running time to open out. The scattered origins of the material get paid for in the sequencing, not in the songs.
Five years on from In Translation (2021), which was a covers album, and nine since From The Trees (2017), the last of his own material. Eleven tracks, forty-six minutes, Esoteric Antenna, 25 September.
Rating: 7.9/10
Text by Guillem Cardós