Magic Tuber Stringband have announced Heavy Water, their new album due May 22nd, alongside the release of lead single Tribute to the Angels. The record marks their first as a full trio — fiddler and field recordist Courtney Werner, guitarist and organist Evan Morgan, bassist and banjoist Mike DeVito (also a member of Weirs) — and arrives as one of the more ambitious statements yet from a group already regarded as leaders within the avant-folk world.
Where their 2024 Thrill Jockey album Needlefall drew on the Appalachian terrain and folk traditions of the American Southeast — what KLOF Mag’s Thomas Blake described as “music that both stems from an active folk tradition but also engages with landscapes as they are today” — Heavy Water shifts toward more explicitly political ground. The album pays tribute to the communities and ecosystems devastated by nuclear arms production in rural South Carolina, and Werner’s dual role as ecologist and musician lends the project a rare coherence. This isn’t folk music borrowing environmental themes for texture, but work that has grown from sustained, firsthand engagement with a wounded landscape. Werner sets the scene:
“The town of Ellenton, South Carolina was the largest of the towns displaced in 1952 by the U.S. federal government to build the Savannah River Plant, which produced radioactive materials for U.S. nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The former site of Ellenton was dedicated to the extraction of heavy water while other areas of the plant focused on manufacturing weapons-grade plutonium and tritium within nuclear reactors. Heavy water is chemically altered to be denser than normal water and is incredibly expensive and time-consuming to produce, requiring 52 gallons of river water for one fluid ounce. The process was fueled by a coal combustion powerhouse, and now the river floodplain adjacent to the remnants of Ellenton is covered by a plume of toxic coal ash.”
It is a stark and precise account, and the music that surrounds it reaches for something equally unsparing. Heavy Water is described as a musical evocation of destruction and resilience — an embrace of dissonance and tension that nonetheless allows for moments of transcendence.
Tribute to the Angels offers one such moment. The band draw on a perhaps unlikely source: “The title of this piece comes from that of a poem by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), written during World War II. It’s part of her Trilogy series in which she revisits the ‘old gods’ and the shards of myth, divinity, and humanity that manage to persist through wartime and fascism. Tribute to the Angels includes a description of an apparition of the Virgin Mary to the poet and her two friends within a dream. The beginning contains fragments of old time tunes (Farewell Trion, Miller Boy) played high up on the neck of the fiddle to bring in harmonics and make it feel lighter and ethereal.”
The result is luminous and unsettled in equal measure — lush melodic flourishes drifting over a spacious, open arrangement, the kind of beauty that carries weight. With field recordings by Jasper Lee and tape manipulation by Oliver Child-Lanning deepening the sonic palette, the trio expand acoustic expression into something genuinely immersive, employing what they describe as an entire ecosystem of sounds: from tender, reverent melodies to bristling harmonics to soundscapes taken directly from the environment itself.
Werner is a recent recipient of the prestigious Hambidge Residency, and the band plan to tour throughout the US this spring, with dates to be announced soon.
Pre-Order Heavy Water: Bandcamp | Thrill Jockey