Arun Sood and Angeline Morrison have announced Donn/Dubh, a collaborative debut album due August 7th via Real World X, Real World Records’ imprint. The pair have also shared the opening track and lead single, ‘A Rìbhinn a Bheil Cuimhn’ Agad‘, alongside a video.
Donn/Dubh — Gaelic for “Black/Brown” — draws on Sood and Morrison’s shared Hebridean heritage. Its conceptual root lies in 10th-century Celtic texts, in which the cardinal directions were associated with different colours; Sood spent years researching colour in traditional Gaelic song archives before reworking those melodies into new compositions and layering them with bass-heavy beats, synths, abrasive guitars and drones built from traditional Scottish instrumentation. Production is by Alastair Smith.
Morrison, whose groundbreaking work illuminating the Black British presence within the folk canon has been well documented on these pages, brings her practice of “mythopoeic singing” to the project — invoking the spectral presence of marginalised Black and Brown figures and holding them in the present. The duo describe themselves as “Brown Hebrideans”, a term that captures the liminal, complex relationship to Gaelic song cultures and the Scottish Gaeltacht that runs through the whole album. Their combined heritage spans Scotland, Jamaica and India.
The lead single opens with Morrison’s searching refrain — “brown girl do you hear me?” — over a pulsing bass she’s described as sounding like a spectral heartbeat, with reverb-laden flutes sitting somewhere between the pastoral and the uncanny. The accompanying video (cinematography & direction by Clare Marie Bailey and video edit by Sood) follows the pair across land and sea, compass in hand.
Sood and Morrison first connected following the release of their respective 2022 solo albums: Morrison’s The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience (The Guardian‘s Folk Album of the Year), and Sood’s experimental ambient-folk album Searching Erskine, which was featured as a Guardian Album of the Month.
Donn/Dubh is available to pre-order on limited edition earth-brown vinyl.
Morrison also has a run of live dates before the release:
Nest Collective Campfire Club, Tower of London — 26 June
Nest Collective Campfire Club, Brighton — 27 June
Deerhshed Festival — 24 July
Saltburn Folk Festival — 7 August
Donn/Dubh (7 August 2026) Real World X
Pre-Order: https://lnk.to/XRW73