Isik Kural has announced Motorcycles and Cherry Wind, his third album for RVNG Intl., due October 30th in vinyl, CD, and digital editions, with a Japanese CD via Plancha. The album’s first single, Winter Sun, is out now with an accompanying video directed by Barnaby Omar.
Winter Sun arrives with an unhurried tenderness, its violin intertwining with piano over Kural’s gentle vocal. The lyrics deal in fleeting, almost photographic images — dragonfly wings, downhill silhouettes, a garden-sweet voice — that accumulate into something closer to a sensory memory than a conventional song. It picks up on the same gift for mood-painting that made 2024’s Moon in Gemini such a distinctive album. Thomas Blake, reviewing that album for KLOF, noted Kural’s ability to draw up interesting and unexpected boundaries, music that feeds off the exhilaration of the uncanny while remaining deeply comforting. On Winter Sun, that balance holds: the moving arrangements begin with a slight hesitation before blossoming fully.
“Isik’s song makes me think of new love,” says director Omar, who shot the video in Glasgow, the city he and Kural share. “I wanted to reflect that in this video. My aim was to give a sense of the excitement, potential, but also apprehension that comes with a new relationship.”
The album itself traces Kural’s travels across Istanbul, ancient Lycia, and Marrakech, where a 2022 trip gave the album its title and spirit. Field recordings — a dolmuş in Istanbul, birdsong from Bridge of Allan, the afterglow of swimming in ancient ruins — are threaded through arrangements of piano, guitar, woodwind, and scored strings. Nine musicians from Brazil, Argentina, Italy, North Macedonia, Spain, England, Germany, Istanbul, and Glasgow contribute, the scattered ensemble collapsing into a single formation with Kural at the centre.
Where Moon in Gemini drew on literary sources — Silvina Ocampo’s poetry, Virginia Astley’s songs — Motorcycles and Cherry Wind turns outward, towards inherited folklore and the accumulated sensory impressions of travel. Blake placed Moon in Gemini in his top ten albums of 2024, describing how Kural paints his pictures using the muted palette of ambient and environmental music, then overlays them with bright, pristine folk. The new album, with its expanded instrumentation and international cast, suggests that palette has widened considerably.
Motorcycles and Cherry Wind follows the As Flurries EP, released earlier this year, which reconfigured material from Kural’s 2019 cassette debut as a set of five instrumental pieces.
Motorcycles and Cherry Wind (October 30th, 2026) RVNG Intl.
Pre-Order/Save here: https://lnk.to/rvngnl139