Golden Samphire Band have shared a video for Waking Moment, from their debut album Dream Is The Driver, released 16th April 2026 via Wayside & Woodland Recordings.
The trio brings together Mik and Rich Hanscomb (Junkboy), with singer-songwriter Hannah Lewis, the three having worked together on tracks for the brothers’ 2023 album Littoral States. Golden Samphire Band takes its name from a coastal flower, and where Junkboy’s records leaned instrumental, this project builds songs around Lewis’s vocals, staying close to the same Sussex coastline that has run through the Hanscombs’ work for two decades.
The song came from Rich Hanscomb’s own swims in Seaford Bay, and the video, finished with post-production help from Wayside & Woodland’s Ben, matches that submerged feeling with a grainy, VHS-to-NTSC treatment. Says Hanscomb:
“Waking Moments is about renewal and the Japanese concept of nature bathing, shinrin-yoku. Finding emotionally and physically restorative experiences in nature. In Golden Samphire Band’s case this is the south Downs and the sea. I came up with some of the lyrics whilst swimming out in Seaford bay and looking over to Seaford Head. The chalk, the green umber and the gentle surf merging as one Zen concept that Mik and Hannah ran with to write the song. Ben from our label, Wayside & Woodland Recordings, then helped in post-production with the video to achieve that VHS to NTSC Hauntological feel – a visual depiction of a barely remembered halcyon summer, a hazy, core (folk) memory.”
Elsewhere on Dream Is The Driver, the band turn to coastal care homes on Bid Farewell, staycations on (We Wunt) Travel Further, and a Brighton Pier murmuration on Starling Dance — all filtered through the same close attention to home ground.
Dream Is The Driver (16th April 2026) Wayside & Woodland Recordings