There’s a quiet hum of excitement about Merlyn Driver’s full-length debut, and with good reason. Since his first EP (This Is the Corner of a Larger Field, 2017), releases have been thin on the ground. His most notable project to date is the 2022 release Simmerdim: Curlew Sounds, a collaborative album curated and produced by Driver, featuring a vast array of talent from the world of folk music and beyond. It marked him out as one of the genre’s free thinkers, immersed in tradition yet willing to experiment, attuned to the ambience of the natural world yet always on hand with a winning melody.
That early EP saw Driver set out his stall as a kind of latter-day Nick Drake, where understated and sensitive songwriting went hand in hand with luxuriant production. On his full-length debut, It Was Also Sometimes Daylight, that formula is tinkered with: new elements are added even as some of the more conventional aspects are roughed up a bit. With the prolific Andy Bell on mixing duties, the sound is predictably impressive, and the range of collaborators—Owen Spafford (fiddle), Francesca Ter-Berg (cello), Nathan Riki Thomson (double bass), among others—create a sonic atmosphere that is both raw and full of warmth.
But it’s Driver’s own story – and the way he tells it – that sets him apart. Raised on an isolated Orkney smallholding, he spent long periods of his childhood outdoors and in the midst of nature. His upbringing directly influences his practice: his songs are rooted in the natural world, and often employ carefully chosen field recordings. Opener Simmerdim ii provides a link to his previous work, beginning with the eerie call of the curlew, before a melancholic and haunting acoustic ballad meanders into view. There is an ease to Driver’s singing and playing, and a lo-fi aspect to the recording, that belies the nuance and complexity of his songwriting, which at times approaches genuine poetry. He is capable of taking highly personal, confessional songwriting and elevating it with unconventional language: Shoal sounds like Richard Thompson, if he’d been a marine biologist.
Onto Something, the album’s first single, rests on softly plucked acoustic guitar and a minimal yet moving lyric about physical displacement and homesickness: here we see Driver at his most vulnerable. There are shades of a less bluesy John Martyn, or Roy Harper in his more serious moments, and Driver’s voice emerges as an important instrument in its own right, subtle and moving. Parachutes, another single, showcases his experimental side. Here we get a first chance to listen to his so-called ‘buzz aesthetic’: a particular timbre commonly found in African music. Driver has conducted anthropological research in this field, and his results are more than just academic: they imbue his music with an unusual and highly engaging dimension.
Driver’s songs often seem to progress organically and seamlessly from one form to another. On The Gathering Place, a moving guitar melody seems to grow naturally out of the field recordings of seabirds, while Half the Past begins with impressionistic, exploratory brushstrokes, which then begin to buzz and pulse almost hypnotically before the song takes on a gnomic, almost occult cast. Cururu sees him sharing vocal duties with a choir of South American frogs. The frog recordings sound almost otherworldly and come courtesy of Mariana Retuci Pontes, a Brazilian biologist, and their presence on this quiet song has a haunting, elegiac effect, a constant reminder of the loss that human progress has wrought upon the natural world.
The album frequently jumps between stranger, less conventional moments and more songwriterly passages. Even at their most pronounced – between Cururu and the classic folk of The Descent, for instance – these shifts are never jarring. This is perhaps because of Driver’s ability to minutely control the overall mood. Melancholia, nostalgia and uncertainty weave natural patterns around each other, with the latter of those three peaking on the droning, dramatic Manndalselva with its wild, repeated coda.
It Was Also Sometimes Daylight has its moments of storm and stress. As an album concerned with the natural world, these moments are in fact necessary: nature is imperfect and often harsh, and no-one knows this better than Merlyn Driver. He also knows, however, that it is a valuable and beautiful thing. The album’s calming final track, The Morning is Wiser than the Evening, makes us aware of that beauty, and ends things on a note of quiet, contemplative positivity, a timely reminder of the small amount of time and space we all take up on this world.
It Was Also Sometimes Daylight (October 10th, 2025) Self Released
Order via Bandcamp: https://merlyndriver.bandcamp.com/album/it-was-also-sometimes-daylight
