January 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of This is Tunng… Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs, the pagan-folktronica debut of Tuung. The unforgettable sound of that memorable debut makes a welcome return on their eighth studio album, Love You All Over Again (January 24th on Full Time Hobby).
Mike Lindsay reveals: “I went back to the first two albums just to listen to how we fused genres – things like Davy Graham, Pentangle, the Expanding Records catalogue and the Wicker Man soundtrack. Over the years, Tunng’s sound has varied and twisted, but at the root there is always a flavour of what Sam [Genders] 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.”
Marking the announcement is their lead single ‘Didn’t Know Why’ which features ‘Jenny’ a familiar Tunng song character/ “It’s very Tunng: dark but then warm and melancholic. Sam heard this and immediately brought back the murderous Jenny, who has appeared on two previous Tunng albums”. Genders offers his take on Jenny. “She once represented a kind of romantic ideal – ‘the one’ – but now she’s a sort of every-person – a kind of archetype of all of us!”
The accompanying video is by Juliet Bryant, who has created work for Beck, David Byrne, and Yo La Tengo. It features the artwork of Lily Buchanan, whose artistic process seems to entwine perfectly with the otherworldliness of Tunng’s nursery rhyme-like offering, ‘Didn’t Know Why’.
My works lie in a dream world made up of sources from my memories, my everyday environment and my emotions.
Buchanan also did the album artwork (see below), which resembles the work from her Desire Drawings series – “Desire is a key theme in my work and I use painting to explore surreal situations that we might find ourselves in when seeking out our desires.“
The lyrics of ‘Didn’t Know Why’ contain the essential ingredients of an old nursery rhyme, one that straddles the dark and grotesque, humour and unnerving nonsense, delivered with a dryness that wouldn’t be out of place in the cult classic film The Wicker Man.
Jenny said no I don’t want to go home
screamed at the sky and she swallowed the phone
swallowed her car and the tv too
burnt her hair and her anorak blue
looked for the cat that swallowed a fly
swallowed that too and she didn’t know why
didn’t know why everybody must die
didn’t know why every lover must sigh
Jenny said I wanna shed my skin
fly like a bee to the tunnel within
spring like a hare through the woods in the dark
eat my bones and my lung and heart…
Love You All Over Again is described an album that gets to the very essence of Tunng. Lindsay sums it up, “For Tunng to work, it has to feel surprising, odd and unpredictable, and the new album has all that. It’s all about Tunng being back, as a family, within our original boundaries, bringing the love to all who have been a part of our journey over 20 years.”
Available for pre-order on ‘Heart Red Vinyl’ & Exclusive ‘Lung Pink Vinyl’ with a limited signed art print.
Track Listing
- Everything Else
- Didn’t Know Why
- Sixes
- Snails
- Laundry
- Drifting Memory Station
- Deep Underneath
- Levitate a Little
- Yeekeys
- Coat Hangers
‘Love You All Over Again’ released January 24th on Full Time Hobby
Preorder the album: https://fulltimehobby.ffm.to/whyisthecolourofthesky