When eight of folk’s most singular voices first gathered to set the words of Robert Macfarlane and the watercolours of Jackie Morris to music, the result was The Lost Words: Spell Songs — a 2019 release we called a mass murmuration of fledgling imaginings. Two studio albums and one live record later, Spell Songs return as a seven-piece for their third and most pointed chapter yet. In Thin Air arrives on 4th September via Hudson Records, and the first single, Flight, is out now.
The theme this time is the sky. In Thin Air is conceived as a musical companion to Macfarlane and Morris’s latest book, The Book of Birds — a successor to The Lost Words and The Lost Spells that reimagines the field guide as a celebration of British birdlife in the wake of threat and decline. The premise is sobering: around half of the world’s bird species are in decline, and our dawns and springs grow quieter year on year. As the book has it, this need not be the way of things, but we will not save what we do not love.
Running through The Book of Birds is a gentle mantra that gives the album its architecture: “Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight, Migration — these are the Seven Wonders that together conjure the miracle of Bird.” Taking those seven attributes as their guide, the collective have built a record that traces a bird’s whole life, from the first stirrings in the nest to the open horizon of migration.
The line-up will be familiar to anyone who has followed the project over the past seven years. Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Kris Drever, Seckou Keita, Rachel Newton, Jim Molyneux and Beth Porter bring instrumental and linguistic reach that spans Orkney to Senegal — kora, electroharp, cello, Indian harmonium and more, alongside vocals carried in several tongues. It is the same septet that delivered Gifts of Light, the live album that distilled the best of the first two records into a single set.
That continuity matters, because Spell Songs has always been less a fixed band than an ongoing conversation between musicians, page and landscape. Speaking to KLOF about the project’s Urban Nature Project performance (at London’s Natural History Museum in 2021), the group described their work as a way to reawaken our instinctive connection to the natural world; Morris, in an earlier interview with us, put it more simply: “The aim of the book was to change focus, to bring into light the everyday, close by, natural world. What is under the nose isn’t always noticed. The aim of the music, I hope, is to take these spells deeper into people’s hearts and souls. Music and memory link in such strong ways. New stories, new songs, I think we are all hungry for this.” In Thin Air extends that idea skyward.
It also lands at a moment when Macfarlane’s collaborations with musicians and illustrators have become a body of work in their own right — from The Lost Spells through to Riversong, a broadside ballad with Nick Hayes in defence of Britain’s waterways. Where those projects gave voice to trees, rivers, and the creatures of The Lost Words, In Thin Air directs its attention to what we stand to lose from the air itself.
The album was conceived and commissioned, as ever, by the Folk by the Oak festival, and the band return to Hatfield House for the festival on 19th July before a UK tour in September (see below). Each show will see Jackie Morris painting birds in ink and watercolour onstage, an artistic dimension that has long been part of the live experience.
In Thin Air is available to pre-order now, with Flight the first taste of what is to come. Seven years on from that first gathering, the collective’s purpose is unchanged: to make us look, and to make us care about what we see there.
In Thin Air is released on 4th September via Hudson Records.
Pre-Order: https://hudsonrecords.co.uk/product/spell-songs—in-thin-air
Tour Dates
19th July 2026: HATFIELD Folk by the Oak Festival
Tickets available here
2nd September 2026: BRISTOL Beacon
Tickets available here
3rd September 2026: BIRMINGHAM Symphony Hall
Tickets available here
4th September 2026: CAMBRIDGE Corn Exchange
Tickets available here
6th September 2026: LIVERPOOL Philharmonic Hall
Tickets available here
7th September 2026: SHEFFIELD Octagon Centre
Tickets available here
8th September 2026: EDINBURGH Usher Hall
Tickets available here
10th September 2026: PERTH Concert Hall
Tickets available here