Brown Horse are a Norwich-based country rock band. Rooted in a collaborative approach to songwriting, the six-piece mixes guitar-driven 90s alternative rock with the folk and country sounds of the 70s. Reservoir is the debut album from Brown Horse. Although recorded over just four days in a quiet corner of Norfolk, the album is a collaborative effort years in the making.
The band, newly signed to Loose Music, will release their debut album on 19th January 2024. Tom Bridgewater of Loose told us:
I saw Brown Horse play a support slot at The Windmill in Brixton and, the next night, found myself at the Norwich Arts Centre with them, headlining to a packed hometown gathering of cool girls and dudes sporting mullets and moustaches. Brilliant! We signed the band the next day. They’re gifted, hard-working musicians, and their songs are like stepping into a Cormac McCarthy novel. What more can you ask for?
An undercurrent of melancholy takes various forms across the songs on the album, including ‘Sunfisher’, a hard-driving country track led by fiddle and electric guitar. Describing silence that “rings like a bell”, the band’s lead single, explores memory, loss and grief. Sunfisher, is accompanied by a video Directed by Mitch Forsyth (watch below).
While Norfolk and the Catskill Mountains may share little in common…Brown Horse could well be Norwich’s answer to the Felice Brothers. Unvarnished yet impeccably crafted, their music has a heartfelt magnetism that gives you plenty to be excited about.
Starting life in 2018 as a folk quartet, Emma Tovell, Nyle Holihan, Patrick Turner and Rowan Braham spent their early days playing old time standards, Michael Hurley covers and original songs in pubs across England. Coming back together in 2022 post-pandemic, the group moved towards a heavier, guitar-driven sound. Introducing Ben Auld to the band on drums, Brown Horse began to make a name for themselves in the resurgent scene of their adopted hometown, Norwich. With the addition of Phoebe Troup in the summer of 2023 completing the line-up, Brown Horse made the short drive north to Sickroom Studios, where they spent four days recording with Owen Turner.
“The studio up there is basically a huge barn surrounded by farm fields and wetlands. It felt like being at Big Pink or something. It’s not too fancy, just a very quiet and beautiful place. There was a little annex a few steps from the studio’s front door with a couple of bunk beds where we’d fall asleep watching The Simpsons after recording all day. In between takes we’d just hang out in the sun. Owen’s got two big golden retrievers, Poppy and Daisy, and they were always running around. There was a bunch of chickens too”.
The songs of Reservoir are rooted in a country-rock tradition. While the band acknowledges an indebtedness to the turn-of-the-millennium alt-country sounds of Uncle Tupelo, Silver Jews, Lucinda Williams, and Jason Molina, the songs on the album also resonate with the preceding “Last Waltz'” generation of seventies folk-rock artists, as well as more recent works.
“When it came time to record, the most difficult thing was working out which songs we would have to leave out. All of us in Brown Horse are songwriters, and each of us have been writing for years, which meant we were walking into the studio with a pretty big back catalogue of songs we couldn’t hope to record all of in just a few days. In the end, we felt that the songs which make up Reservoir shared something tonally; a kind of dark undercurrent which verges on desperation at points. It’s kind of a sad album, which is strange given how much fun we had making it”.
Brown Horse’s ‘Reservoir will be released on 19th January 2024. Pre-order it here.
For tour dates and more: https://linktr.ee/brownhorse