When The Owl Service first emerged in 2006, the UK underground was ablaze with cottage-industry labels, independent festivals, and a multitude of stoned, eager weirdos. Social media was but a twinkle in Satan’s eye, and smartphones hadn’t yet reduced us all to anxious, isolated haters with screen-tans and the attention spans of cucumbers. Perhaps, in response to these nascent technologies, there was a blossoming interest in traditional folk culture. It was as if people were looking for herbal remedies to the gathering digital storm – ones which prioritised handcrafted, communally-orientated, seasonally-observant forms of making which simultaneously doffed the cap to trad. tropes whilst mutating and dismantling them. Indeed, The Owl Service took their name from Alan Garner’s book and the experimental late-60s TV series about teenage innocents awakening an ancient Welsh curse.
Scroll forward 20 years, and The Owl Service are one of the last bands standing. Tied to the Land is their first album in a decade, and it signals a lineup change as Jason Steel, Diane Collier and Nancy Wallace exit stage-left and Dorothy Chappell and Rebecca Lievers join bandleader Steven Collins in a joyous rendering of traditional songs, instrumentals and an adaptation of a Cornish folk tale.
Album opener, Bonnie Boy, juxtaposes ominous drones with melodious bird song before careening into classic folk rock with juggernaut guitar, drums, tambourine and Joolie Wood’s (ex-Current 93) tantric violin. Lievers’ dreamy vocal is swathed in delay as she sings about the perils of falling for a 17th-century fuckboi. Chappell takes the lead on Barbara Allen, and the unadorned, bell-like clarity of her voice is counterpointed beautifully amid grinding guitar and Julian Overall’s serpentine saxophone. Overall’s sax hangs like an existential question mark over The Trees They Do Grow High as Chappell sings with hypnotic fluency about fatalistic arranged marriage against Collins’ dynamic arrangement.
Revolt from the Monolith, Come Back to the Village offers a change of pace with its squelchy synths, Mellotron strings and samples from the 1970’s folk horror fable Penda’s Fen, which amplifies the message of humankind returning to a community-focused way of life that’s in harmony with the rhythms and rituals of the pagan calendar year. The Mermaid of Zennor recounts obscure Cornish lore about an anthropomorphised creature from the drink seducing a local lad and living with him under the sea. The tale is memorialised by a 15th-century carving in St Senara’s church near West Penwith (the most mystical part of the peninsula) – here the band adapt the story with plaintive organ and Leivers’ acrobatic singing before Collins’ guitar and Overall’s sax entwine like a sonic stained glass window. Album closer, The Gay Goshawk, features both singers alternating verses like two peregrine falcons conjoined in an aerial mating ritual. Their voices are a study in opposites, with Chappell’s celestial purity offsetting Lievers’ earthy tactility. It’s a potent brew that supercharges the 10-year-overnight success of Tied To The Land.
This album is a bright star in a constellation of other contemporary folk acts such as Fuzzy Lights, Angeline Morrison, Lavinia Blackwall, Jim Ghedi and the weird and wonderful roster at Broadside Hacks – all of whom seem to be rejecting the A.I’ification of the modern world for something arcane and vital. Revolt from the monolith and come back to the village, people.
Tied to the Land (October 16th, 2026) Hobby Horse