Henry Parker returns on May 1st (via Cup and Ring) with The Dark Peak (Digital/CD/Ltd LP), a solo guitar EP rooted in the gritstone moorland of the Peak District National Park. It follows his 2024 collaborative album with David Ian Roberts, Chasing Light, which KLOF Mag’s Glenn Kimpton described as a high-quality meeting of two of our most dynamic advocates of the acoustic guitar. Where that album thrived on the interplay and conversation between two players, The Dark Peak strips things back to a single voice — Parker alone with his guitar and the landscape itself.
Parker’s relationship with the English countryside has long been central to his work. Thomas Blake’s review of Lammas Fair in 2021 identified him as being at the forefront of a loose, ecologically-aware movement within contemporary folk, making music deeply rooted in the wild landscape of northern England. The Dark Peak pushes that impulse further, into something closer to field work than studio craft. The EP was shaped by a multi-day backpacking trip across Bleaklow and the Upper Derwent ridges in March 2025, during which Parker captured the sounds of curlews, lapwings, grouse and the bitter winds that drive over these high and lonely tops.
The music is a response to existing in that landscape — its history, topography and nature in early spring. Ostensibly a solo guitar record, it reflects the rhythms of long-distance hiking and wild camping, activities that have become as second nature to Parker as the delicate fingerpicking heard across these tracks. The influences stretch from the orchestral pastoralism of Holst and Vaughan Williams to the American primitive guitar tradition of Robbie Basho and the contemporary work of Toby Hay, a player with whom Parker shares both a sensibility and a history of adjacent releases on KLOF.
You can hear ‘Upper Derwent’, the opening track now:
Parker has also shared a live video for Upper Derwent, filmed on a freezing December 2025 afternoon at one of the old shooting cabins in the heart of the Dark Peak. You can watch it below.
For those familiar with Chasing Light and Lammas Fair, The Dark Peak is the perfect companion, one that feels more solitary and elemental — “a deeply researched and reflective piece of landscape music, in honour of the moors of Bleaklow and the Upper Derwent ridges.”
Pre-Order Now: https://henryparker.bandcamp.com/album/the-dark-peak