The Unthanks tell stories that capture children. They make music cutting edge enough to be BBC 6 Music regulars. They can equally be found on Radios 2, 3 and 4, reframing history and drawing together the worlds of folk, jazz, orchestral, electronic and rock music. The believability of their storytelling is admired by some of our best storytellers – Mackenzie Crook, Elvis Costello, Maxine Peake, Nick Hornby, Martin Freeman, Robert Wyatt, Charles Hazelwood, Ben Myers and David Mitchell, to name a few.
“The Unthanks are capable of such beauty that sometimes I can hardly bear to listen to them.” Martin Freeman
At the nucleus of a constantly evolving unit is the traditional upbringing of Tyneside sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank and the arrangements and writing of Barnsley composer, pianist and producer, Adrian McNally. The Unthanks have been described as “a take on tradition that flips so effortlessly between jazz, classical, ambient and post-rock, it makes any attempt to put a label on them a waste of time”.
Using the traditional music of the North East of England as a starting point, the influence of Miles Davis, Steve Reich, Sufjan Stevens, Robert Wyatt, Antony & The Johnsons, King Crimson and Tom Waits makes The Unthanks a unique band, earning them a Mercury Music Prize nomination and international acclaim along the way.
“The Unthanks are capable of such beauty that sometimes I can hardly bear to listen to them.” Martin Freeman
Recorded in one wintry week on the North York Moors, their latest album, The Unthanks In Winter is an extensive, completist time-capsule of the season, featuring Christmas tunes known throughout the western world, mixed with the traditional and the newly written, all passed with great care and love through The Unthanks filter. With most pieces drifting into the next, In Winter is a dream-like winter fantasia, embracing both the dark and the light in the most ritualistic of seasons. Moving in and out of focus, like a memory, its a bittersweet hymnal to our shared winter experience.
Released on gatefold double vinyl and double CD, its the band’s sixteenth album, but a world in itself, capturing the warmth and nostalgia of the festive season, the chill and darkness of the winter months, and the reflective ritualism’s of the turn of the year; the end and beginning of the circle of life.
In typical magpie style, The Unthanks collect and reimagine with deep musical intelligence, at once unique and familiar, inventive but natural and effortless. You will hear what a Tyneside band playing a German Christmas song in the style of The Beach Boys sounds like (O Tannenbaum); a Spanish carol performed by English folkies through the filter of Tom Waits (Carol Of The Birds); a French carol given desert blues menace, a newly written tribute to the NHS to the tune of O Holy Night (Nurse Emmanuel); an opening piece inspired by A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten (In Winter’s Night); traditional wassails and old stories coloured with folk noir and traces of Vincent Guaraldi’s Merry Christmas Charlie Brown.
The sisters have been researching and idly harmonising to songs for a winter album that has been on the Unthank to-do list for 15 years, so it’s little surprise that In Winter has a completist feel about it – a future classic of the Christmastime genre perhaps?
The work was toured in developmental form last Winter. Before rehearsals began, musical director and producer Adrian McNally revisited his embryonic recordings and found that all his sketches were recorded in one solitary Christmas evening at the piano, on New Years Eve 2022.
With McNally determined to get away from the piano as much as possible on this album, he gave many of his piano sketches away to bandmate and childhood friend Chris Price to interpret on guitar, Sometime Unthanks utility man and double bassist Dan Rogers was brought in to free Price up from bass duties, and Will Hammond (vibraphone) and Faye MacCalman (sax, clarinet) joined Niopha Keegan (violin) to provide a new sound palette. Using the album as an opportunity to filter his ideas through a different sound world, McNally finds himself on drums, harmonium and celeste to avoid the piano, resulting in a different sounding 8-piece band on Dark December, Gower Wassail and Carol Of The Beasts.
Here is the first single taken from the album:
Some of those early piano sketches make it through to the record intact however, providing abstract memories and ways for the album to possess some of the finest Christmas tunes, without the religious words. Elsewhere on the record, religion is not shied away from, The Unthanks embracing one of the biggest stories ever told, purely as storytellers.
Becky Unthank provides new songs, River River and Dear Companions, both written with her partner, the animation filmmaker Ainslie Henderson, and then arranged with McNally, who himself contributes Nurse Emmanuel, a tribute to the NHS co-written with prize-winning poet Vanessa Lampert. Becky’s Dear Companions features the voices of 60 people, recorded on one of the band’s infamous singing residentials.
“It hits you in your soul rather than your head. I love them.” Adrian Edmondson
The Unthanks tour In Winter across Ireland and the UK in from Nov 26th:
26/11 Galway Roisin Dubh
27/11 Belfast Empire
28/11 Dublin Liberty Hall Theatre
29/11 Cork St Luke’s
01/12 Glasgow City Halls
03/12 Gateshead The Glasshouse ICM
04/12 Lytham Saint Annes Lowther Pavilion
05/12 Hull City Hall
06/12 Hastings White Rock Theatre
07/12 Worthing Assembly Hall
09/12 Birmingham Town Hall
10/12 Nottingham Albert Hall
11/12 Norwich Epic Studios
13/12 Saffron Walden Saffron Hall
14/12 Harrogate Royal Hall
15/12 Manchester New Century Hall
16/12 Poole The Lighthouse
17/12 Exmouth Pavilion
18/12 Bodmin St Petroc’s Church
19/12 Bristol Beacon
20/12 Pontardawe Arts Centre
21/12 London Cadogan Hall (Evening Sold Out / Matinee On Sale)
22/12 Basingstoke Haymarket
For further information please visit:
https://www.instagram.com/theunthanksband/
