Video Premiere: Yulatraktors – Remember the Poor

The award-winning ‘broken folk’ duo Lunatraktors have a festive alter-ego – Yulatraktors. Their new album, Solstice Wyrd, is out tomorrow. The duo, who have featured many times in these pages, and describe their offerings as “folk music for queers and lunatics, misfits and nonconformists. People exiled from family, society or homeland, with little patience for nationalistic fantasies of the pure tradition. A pagan rave where all are welcome the weirder the better. Lunatraktors’ work explores tradition as a folding or layering of time: present troubles echoing through history and pre-figuring events in the future—a haunted landscape where psychic patterns from past eras are unceasingly dug up and re-buried. Icons are hacked down and half-forgotten, only to sprout from the ground again decades or centuries later. This is the Wyrd of the British Isles, the twisted knot of fate. Anachronism as folk horror.”

Taken from their new album, watch the video below for Remember the Poor; while it could be found on ballad sheets from the early 1800s, the song is, unfortunately, still very relevant today.

Peel back the colourful paper — the enforced gaiety and extravagance of a consumerist Christmas, or the vestiges of Christianity — and there’s something very different underneath. For many people, the holiday season is burdened by unwelcome emotions. Anxiety, grief and loneliness feel all the more overwhelming because there’s an assumption that ‘negativity’ shouldn’t be shared. Lunatraktors believe we should stop shutting out the shadows. Holly, ivy and fir trees, wreaths, fires and mistletoe: these things go back a long, long way. There’s a reason Christmas used to be a time to tell ghost stories. Yule is the dark heart of the year, the midwinter solstice and the longest night. Let’s go out into the night, let’s free our feral selves to howl our pain and defiance, to dance in the frozen moonlight and the flickering of the fire.

Order Solstice Wyrd on Bandcamp: https://lunatraktors.bandcamp.com/album/yulatraktors-solstice-wyrd

Details of their upcoming live shows this month can be found below.