Experimental music has a distinct advantage over more fixed genres: its fluidity and openness allow it to be simultaneously serious and fun. Some bands, composers, performers and even fans didn’t get this memo, but Hen Ogledd truly understand the assignment. Discombobulated is their third album as a quartet, and it is as fresh, weird, pranksterish, passionate and downright uncategorisable as we have come to expect. The combination of Sally Pilkington, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Dawn Bothwell – each of them an accomplished songwriter and composer – remains as potent as ever, and their blend of freaky electronic folk-rock, politically charged psych-pop and modernist compositional techniques is still elusive, bewildering and brilliant.
A glance at Discombobulated’s list of contributors might suggest a confusing maximalist soup: Finnish metal singers rub shoulders with revered sound recordists, while big-name American experimental jazz sits alongside the children of band members. When you mix all the colours together indiscriminately, you will often end up with a brown sludge, but Hen Ogledd miraculously avoid this fate. In fact, they manage to go the other way: this is music that seems to invent new colours, brighter or more nuanced than the ones we know. That is because Hen Ogledd understand the constraints and freedoms of space and time. They allow each element its breathing room. The scene is set by spoken opener Nell’s Prologue, a child’s-eye dispatch from a bucolic if slightly eerie woodland. This kind of teaser gives us a small, incomplete clue to the album’s structural elements: clearly, there is a narrative, but its exact nature remains mysterious.
Some clarity emerges on Scales Will Fall, an eight-minute slab of post-rapture sci-prog poetry that ranges from Presbyterian reform to the women of Greenham Common, and on to a kind of apocalyptic youth revolt. Bothwell takes on the role of ringmaster – or perhaps cult leader – urging the kids to ‘rise up’ and ‘tear[…] down the corporate wall.’ It is a song of two halves, the fanfare of the first part giving way to a jazzy freak-out before the rallying cry of the chorus kicks back in. Thematically, it cements a preoccupation with building a better future and emphasises the primacy of youth. Musically, it is a stirring, ragged anthem.
Dead in a Post-Truth World, sung in Welsh and English, bemoans the evils of our politicians – ‘gammon on the telly’ – to a musical backdrop of electro future-funk and clattering percussion which at times threatens to put the ‘disco’ in ‘discombobulated.’ (The unexpected theme of disco raises its head again in the lyrics of the otherwise tender Clara, which is strange and decentred even by Hen Ogledd’s standards.) Their post-truth world is instantly recognisable as the present day; lyrics take well-aimed potshots at shit-brained patriots (‘The mythical country/you claim allegiance of is gone./It was never here’) and – more importantly – the people in power who feed them lies. If we didn’t know it before, we do now: Hen Ogledd are concerned about the political state of the world, the ethical corners humanity has backed itself into. They are planning to fight their way out of those corners. While their music often has a progressive edge, their political standpoint is more closely aligned with a militant-leftist strand of punk: admirably anti-bigotry, anti-corporate, anti-corruption.
This is an album that sees art as a possible way out of a morass, a route to the future. As it has already become clear, that future is the ambiguous birthright of generations just-born and as yet unborn. So the prevalence of children’s voices on many of these songs makes sense: it is a political choice as well as an artistic one. The same can be said for the other collaborators. These include Chris Watson, whose field recordings have always foregrounded the importance of the natural world, and Matana Roberts, the experimental saxophonist and vocalist whose work frequently touches on themes of slavery and the institutionalised racism in America, past and present.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Discombobulated is how melodic, how propulsive, how downright dancey it manages to be. Exhibit A: End of the Rhythm, a paean to physical movement and the emancipatory power of the collective, which hurtles along in a pulsating rush that only adds to the urgency of Bothwell’s words. Even the minute-long a capella Amser a Ddengys, with its repetitive joining together of voices, manages to invoke a physical rush.
The pace shifts down for Clear Pools, which, at nearly twenty minutes long, is something of a magnum opus. Beginning with a crashing drum solo, it moves through periods of lyrical and musical reflection, vivid depictions of recovery from trauma and anxiety. It is here that the band most fully – and most simply – synthesise their personal and political predilections. Bright guitars, cascades of keys, calm and melodic voices, and lyrics that emphasise stillness and clarity repeat and redouble. The song is a hypnotic swirl, a dream to get lost in, or to find yourself in. The influence of new age music is apparent, and the whole piece feels like a kind of humanist spiritual. It is inclusive and transcendent. At one point, a spoken-word section in Finnish (from Janne Westerlund of metal band Circle) inserts itself into the flow, dovetailing perfectly and never feeling like an interruption. It really is a beautiful piece.
So too is album closer Land of the Dead, albeit in a more disconcerting and ambivalent way. Ghostly piano and slow, nocturnal, jazzy rhythms back up Davies’ Welsh intonations. It makes for a deliciously uncanny, somewhat mysterious end to an album that, for the most part, wears its heart on its sleeve. Hen Ogledd are always entertaining and intellectually engaging, and on Discombobulated, they have given us their most consistent, relevant and boundary-pushing record yet.
DISCOMBOBULATED (February 20th, 2026) Domino
Hen Ogledd’s DISCOMBOBULATED party
Saturday 14th February
Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle
Tickets – pre-order the album for access
Pre-order on DomMart-exclusive pink vinyl (w/ signed art print), standard vinyl, CD and digitally: DomMart | Digital