It’s not unknown for folk music to want you to have a good time. Like anything passed down from generation to generation, part of its appeal – and its reason for existing – is the human need for shared emotion. That emotion can be grief or anger or, frequently, joy, and joy is often expressed through communal music making and movement. Singing and dancing together helps communities to exist and individuals to make sense of what is going on in their heads. We feel better after a good sing; we feel closer to our peer groups and loved ones after a dance. Traditional music is one way of implementing this, but there are others: just ask anyone who has pogo’d at a punk gig or pulled out some cheesy moves to ABBA, Jagger or Donna Summer.
It’s comparatively uncommon for musicians from folk backgrounds to tap into other dance-centred genres, but the four artists who make up Birdvox understand that there is a rich seam to be mined here. They are a kind of supergroup, all sharing vocal and multi-instrumental duties: Sarah Hayes – a noted solo artist and member of Glasgow indie folk favourites Admiral Fallow, Shetland-born Inge Thomson – a co-founder of Harem Scarem and member of Karine Polwart’s band who has also collaborated with Lau and the Broken Family Band, Jenny Sturgeon – a prolific solo artist and member of Salt House, and Charlotte Printer – who played bass with Joesef and performed with Altered Images.
The bouncy punk-pop of Altered Images isn’t a bad place to start when talking about the kind of music Birdvox have created on Shamming the Drama. But it is just a start. At any given time, the quartet might backtrack into traditional Scottish folk, sidestep into pulsing disco beats or lean forwards into glitchy, blissful electronica. The arty post-punk of the Raincoats, or latter-day variants like Serafina Steer’s Bas Jan, are touchstones, but Birdvox’s debt to traditional music gives their sound a unique edge. This debt is at its most obvious in the songs sung in languages other than English. There are linguistic forays into Scots and Norn, and Grey Fedder uses Roseanne Watt’s Shetland dialect translation of Kathleen Jamie’s poem Grey Feather: it begins with a glimmer of electronics, before foregrounding the human voice in a spinetinglingly intimate way. It is awash with stunning harmonies, while the melody proceeds at a glacial pace and the electronic effects twinkle through like mica in sand.
Grey Fedder represents the album at its most ambient and sonically enveloping. Around it are gathered songs in varying degrees of jumpiness and danceability. Almosts and Redos builds from a foundation of funky, chicken-scratch percussion – something like a futuristic Talking Heads – and relates an all-too-familiar tale of contemporary anxiety. A whole generation of people have had to learn how to have fun in the face of political uncertainty and personal difficulty, and this song sums that quandary up eloquently. The early Human League throb that kicks off Sparx is offset by itchy, glitchy effects and vocals that sound like Hen Ogledd covering Hounds of Love. It shifts gear into a gloriously kinetic slice of electro-folk, and you’re never quite sure where the traditional instruments end and the synthetic ones begin. The addition of Chris Greive’s trombone adds a further layer of welcome chaos.
Combinations of ancient and contemporary are served up in different ways in different parts of Shamming the Drama. King Orfeo presents a juicy narrative in ballad form and backs it up with bone-dry beats, while the immediately arresting opener Sea Change once again channels Kate Bush, but this time backs it up with quick-footed, sophisticated disco and a flurry of traditional dance melodies. One of the joys of this album is that you never quite know where you stand, and Sea Change is a kind of mission statement to that very effect. And it makes us aware straight away that this is music for thinking about as well as dancing to. The lyrics touch on the misogyny that still exists in the music industry. Set Me Up touches on similar themes, though here they are delivered in a deliberate, minimal manner: the delicate vocal harmonies and stop-start synths give space for both vulnerability and strength to be expressed.
Another theme running through Shamming the Drama is the natural world (and, implicitly, the increasing need for humans to take better care of it). Gannets is a swooping instrumental, where a flute flutters acrobatically against a backdrop of dancey pulses, synthesised scrapes and intriguing churring sounds. The closing piece, Wagtails, features field recordings of birdsong and strange, looped percussion along with disembodied, wordless vocals and more of that agile flute. It sounds in places like a folkier Virginia Astley, and fades into a bucolic reverie of piano and the sound of wildlife. Cicadas, by contrast, presents an almost industrial side of the group’s electro-pop. Lyrically, it is a meditation on transience, touching on human loss and grief but never surrendering its right to get your feet tapping.
Fire Baby, with its propulsive, minimal synths, has elements of Moroder, Marc Almond, the Pet Shop Boys and perhaps even New Order, but the vocals make it something else entirely, something atavistic and at one with nature in a way that is generally considered the preserve of folk music. No matter that this is – on the surface at least – one of the album’s least folky songs: the quartet have, by this stage, developed their sound so thoroughly that they can rebuild it at will, using the various elements in different combinations, always threatening a left turn into unexpected realms. Shape of a Friend begins, for example, with a trace of neoclassical flute, and then careering into a pop melody that Christine McVie would be more than happy to have written. We Are is an affirmation of the power of community, a hopeful and distinctly contemporary message wrapped in the musical language of 1980s left-field pop.
Of all the many elements that come together to make Birdvox sound like no other band you’ve ever heard, that sense of community might just be one of the most important. The idea that four very different musicians can join up and make folk music that is also pop music, music that you can dance to, grieve with and wonder at: that such experiences still exist and can be conjured out of the ether by four multi-instrumentalists from Scotland – surely that’s something to celebrate.
Shamming the Drama (September 18th, 2026) Hudson Records
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